Esperanza Hope To Cope: 4 Simple Ways To Help You Find Your Happy

8/2/2018

by Robin L. Flanigan

Finding true happiness is a serious—and sometimes complicated—matter. Luckily, here are some simple tips to help.

By Robin L. Flanigan

Happiness is serious business— there’s even an annual World Happiness Summit that draws people from over 30 countries who want to learn about how to perceive and achieve it. And there are all kinds of idioms to describe it: happy as a clam, tickled pink, on cloud nine. Here are some ways to increase the pleasure in your life:

#1) Know your strengths.

A person with good spatial reasoning skills would be much happier as an architect than a human resources manager. Do something you’re good at and “you’re feeding your soul something it wants,” says Happiness Experts Company founder Paul Krismer. “Do what gives you passion and purpose.”

#2) Amplify a positive experience.

That can be as simple as eating a piece of cake slowly, paying attention to the intricate flavors instead of wolfing it down, according to Acacia Parks, PhD. Or take a few minutes in the shower to notice the warmth, the feel of the water on your skin. “People spend so much time on autopilot, they don’t take time to appreciate beautiful things.”

#3) Avoid repression.

Eastern cultures accept that life brings with it the good and the bad. But in the West, we “try to hide the negative aspects of ourselves in the corners of our mind so nobody can see them—not even ourselves,” says Richard A. Enander, PhD. “And that inherently feels disingenuous and unfulfilling.”

#4) Try meditation.

“I’ve found that meditation helps me put a space between negative stimuli and my reactions to the negative stimuli,” says author John Leland. “I know the negative stimuli probably won’t kill me, but my reactions to them might. This gap helps me manage my reactions.”