5 Tips on How to be Happier Right Now

1. Become empowered

Get off the emotional rollercoaster and stop the hedonic treadmill to create your upward spiral instead.  Stop waiting around for other people places things and situations to make you happy.  Choose to take your happiness into your own hands right now!

2. Create a Positive Mood

Adopt a happiness practice today. This means focus your attention on positive thinking, living in the moment, and conscious activities like love and kindness to boost your mood from the inside out. Exercise counts for a lot so you can easily start there with moving your body at least 20 min a day. Seek to provide yourself with at least 3 positive emotional experiences daily.

3. Overcome challenges

Use resiliency skills like forgiveness, acceptance, perseverance, bravery, realistic optimism to help you overcome any challenge you may be facing at the moment. Dig deep for your can-do attitude.  You are the only one you can truly count on to ‘bring it!’

4. Create Contentment

Ask yourself the deeper questions about your life’s purpose. What truly gives you a sense of meaning in life? How can you actualize your true self in the world around you? What are your natural strengths?

5. Achieve Bliss

Connect to something larger than yourself. Visit nature, a rock concert, meditate, and pray.  If this is out of your realm of possibility, seek to talk about faith with other people of a variety of backgrounds to see what they do.

Bonus Tip! How to help those around you become happier!  

Use the AAA

I admire ___

I appreciate ____

Show affection

Everyone needs more admiration, appreciation and affection in life. This technique is from research by Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside.