5 Life Changing Ideas from Happiness Research

What is a greater priority in your life: happiness or success?

While it is possible to achieve both, we often sacrifice one for the other when making major life decisions such as what career to pursue, whether to move to the suburbs to afford a bigger house, or whether to attend a family event if it means getting less work done.

The science of happiness, also known as positive psychology, basically studies human behavior and positive emotions with the aim of determining what factors can result in an increased level of happiness. The conclusions from this research can provide interesting insights into how we can maximize our happiness. Read the Rest of This Article »

Everything You Need To Know About Happiness

“Happiness” courtesy of Zhong Bioa

The truth about affirmations:
With all of these books around touting the benefits of affirmations, Psychologists became curious to know whether they actually worked.

They brought together many different subjects, having various degrees of self confidence and told them to repeat positive statements about their self confidence such as “I am confident” and “I am worthy”

What was found is that confident people felt more confident after the experiment while those who lacked confidence felt even worse.

The explanation is simple, when you repeat a statement that matches your inner belief system your subconscious mind will be reminded of the statement and will let you feel good if it was a positive one, on the other hand if you tried to force your subconscious mind to believe in something against its belief system it will sense the deception and so make you feel guilty.

In short, affirmations can never make you happy if you weren’t already happy nor can they make you more confident if you weren’t already feeling confident. Read the Rest of This Article »

5 Ways to Laugh When You Want to Cry

Image courtesy of Roy Lichtenstein

Life is wonderful! Life is a miracle! Life is awesome!

Life is in fact all of these things. Unfortunately, reality being what it is, life can, from time to time, suck beyond the telling of it. Every so often life comes along and metaphorically kicks you in the gut.

During these times it is perfectly normal to want to cry. There is nothing wrong with wallowing in brief bouts of self-pity.

That key is that those bouts be “brief.” Excessive self pity accomplishes nothing. When you are ready to move on, here are five things you can do to laugh when the world wants you to cry:

(Note: I’m not talking about real tragedy, like when a loved one passes away. I’m talking about the occasions when we throw a pity party for ourselves because we got dumped, or got laid off, or lost a promotion to Chuck, the office brown noser…) Read the Rest of This Article »

9 Ways to Boost Your Mood

All of us have times when we just seem to be in a bad mood with the world in general. Here’s a few quotes from the last hour or two on Twitter:

• “People suck. I’m in a bad mood. Ugh.”
• “Wish I knew why I was in such a fowl mood. Nothing bad happened today, in fact it went rather well. I just feel like… bleh!”
• “Ever just *know* you’re going to be in a bad mood, like a weather forecast? Hoping tomorrow’s not a bad day.”

I’m sure you can think of some moments during the past week when you’ve felt exactly the same. I know I can. And I hate being grumpy: I snap at people unfairly, I feel a complete lack of motivation towards my goals, and I often end up spiralling further and further into a Really Bad Mood.

Gradually, though, I’ve found some things which really do help when I’m feeling like this. The hardest thing is actually doing them. When I’m grouchy, a big part of me wants to stay grouchy and fed-up, and I struggle to see the point of trying to feel better. So print out this list, or write your favourite ways on a big bit of paper, and stick it to the wall – and promise yourself that next time you want to kick the cat, yell at your neighbour and phone up your mom to whinge, you’ll try something from the list first.
Read the Rest of This Article »