Happiness - A GREAT DREAM

Happy people are healthier, live longer, give back more to their communities, cultivates stronger family and societies, and even make more money. The very stability and well-being of every family depends on the personal happiness of each and every one of us. Happiness can be amassed by harnessing our strengths rather than prodding on how our weaknesses may work against us. Expressing gratitude, performing acts of kindness, exercising, making time for family and friends can make a measurable difference in your life. The changes you make in your own life will definitely make you feel good and will also have a ripple effect that will influence your friends, your kids, your co-workers and their friends, their kids and their co-workers. When you are around people who are pessimistic, you start to get down too, and the reverse is also true. Happiness now and in the future, depends on you. Here are 10 simple steps synthesized into a wonderful acronym “GREAT DREAM” that we can all take to create happiness in our lives and the lives of others:

1.       Giving: Do things for others. Giving is the habit of giving freely without expecting anything in return. Caring about others is fundamental to our happiness. Helping other people is not only good for them and great thing to do, but it also makes us happier and healthier. Giving strengthen the connections between people and helps to build a happier and more engaging society for everyone. And mind you, giving is not all about money, we can also give our time, ideas and energy and make an impact on the people around us and our community.

2.       Relating: Connect with people. Relationship is the most important overall contributor to happiness. Our connections with other people are at the heart of happiness – theirs and ours. Whether these connections are with our partners, families, friends, co-workers, neighbors or people in our broader

communities, they all contribute to our happiness. People with strong and broad social relationships are happier, healthier and live longer. Close relationship with family and friends provide love, meaning and support, and increase our feelings of self-worth. Broader networks bring sense of belonging. So working on our relationships is good for happiness and working on our happiness is good for our relationships. That is a wind all round!

3.       Exercising: Take care of your body. Exercise your mind, body and spirit so you can be someone people count on, and so you can live expansively and with abundance. Get to a world class fitness level. Nothing is more important than health, it is more important than your family, because If you do not have good health, you cannot be there for your family, cannot celebrate with your family. Often we take our health for granted until we lose it. When we are young we would sacrifice our health for wealth and yet when we get old and figure out what life is truly all about, we would sacrifice every penny of our wealth for one good day health. To commit yourself for self-care take care of your health. When you are in really a good physical condition life is lot more fun, lot happier.

4.       Appreciating: Notice the world around you. Happiness is not getting what you want, it is appreciating what you have. We just need to stop and take notice. Learning to be more mindful and aware can do wonders for our well-being in all areas of life – like our commute to work, the way we eat or our relationships. It helps us get in tune with our feelings and stops us dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, so we get more out of the day-to day. Gratitude is the key to happiness.

5.       Trying out: Keep learning new things. Learning affects our well-being in lots of positive ways. It exposes us to new ideas and helps us stay curious and engaged. It also gives us a sense of accomplishment and helps boost our self-confidence and resilience. There are many ways to learn new things –not just through formal qualifications. We can share a skill with friends, join a club, learning to sing, learning to play a new sport and so much more.

6.       Direction: Have goals to look forward to. Feeling good is 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. Goals are the way we can turn our values and dreams into reality. Happiness does not just happen, it comes from thinking, planning and pursuing things that are important to us.

7.       Resilience: Find ways to bounce back. Resilience is the ability to bend instead of breaking when under pressure or difficulty, or the ability to persevere and adapt when faced with challenges. All of us have times of stress and difficulty in our lives. But how we respond to them has a big impact on our well-being. We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose our own attitude to what happens. In practice it is not always easy but one of the most exciting findings from recent research is that resilience, like many other life skills, can be learned.

8.       Emotion: 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 half-full rather than the glass half-empty. Positive emotions help us to build the resources that lead to happier lives, such as friends, knowledge, better problem solving and even better health. Positive emotion can act as a buffer against stress and help us cope when we face difficulties.

9.       Acceptance: Be comfortable with who you are. No one is perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Dwelling on our flaws - what we are not rather than what we have go –

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 accepts others as they are. If we do not fulfil the conditions we set ourselves, and so fail, we think of ourselves as a loser or good for nothing rather than accepting failing as a normal part of life and learning from it. If we are low on self-acceptance, we can be troubled by aspects of who we think we are and long to be something or someone different. This can lead to dwelling more on what’s wrong with us or what we are not, leading to a lot of negative self-talk. And this really gets in the way of making the most of ourselves, and of our happiness.

10.     Meaning: 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. Research shows that having a connection to something bigger than ourselves, a religious belief or spiritual side to our lives makes us happier and healthier. Meaning is a vital component of happiness and wellbeing.

Source: http://www.actionforhappiness.org and “10 steps to happiness” by Vanessa King, an article in Success Magazine