How to Be Happy - A SCIENTIFIC PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Happiness is the feeling of contentment and satisfaction that craved by many but only achieved by some. Happiness is relative and subjective but for many successful individuals the presence of a great family life in a flourishing career is often not enough. On some occasions, compels individual from feeling a sense of loneliness, often sadness and melancholy. In order to understand how to be happy, we need to look at the ways we react to everything around us. Behavioral scientists have made lots of studying to find the secret of happiness. 

Here are psychological five reasons why people have a harder time finding happiness. 

1)    Being Overly Ambitious

People feel not satisfied with what they already have.  Their complex mind gives them the ability to see something bigger and better a purpose.  These people fail to enjoy mundane things in everyday life because their minds crave something stimulating and fantastically idealistic that cannot be found in the real world. This is often manifested by inability to accept the time and space they belong to. They feel that they are living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everything could be better but it just is not. An addiction to ambition makes an individual to compromises with his our own and others' health, happiness, and well-being.

2)     Holding High Standards   

Individuals sometimes hold everything with high standards. The failure to reach these standards often leads to frustration and disappointment regardless if it is their career relationships or anything else that they hold importance in their life.  Poor practical intelligence and the idealistic view of the world of people with brilliant theoretical minds often have trouble coping with the raw reality of life.  When faced with issues that contradict their expectations this inevitably lead to feelings of great disappointment.

3)     Being Extremely Self-Critical

Unhappiness also stems from the deep thinking nature. Not limited to their success and failures these individuals rigorously analyze and compare themselves to higher standards that they unintentionally seek reasons to blame themselves. These people often experience flashbacks of events that happen months sometimes years ago of situations which they believe they behaved poorly or inappropriately. Negative emotions such as guilt and discontent fill their minds and disturb their mood dowsing out any form of happiness of the person.

4)    Feeling Often Misunderstood

Everyone yearns to be understood and accepted. The comfort of having meaningful conversations with a like-minded person one who shares the same ideas worldviews and philosophies is priceless. Most unhappy people hardly ever find someone who can connect with them. This makes them feel alone and misunderstood that no one is capable of seeing and appreciating the deep brilliance of their minds.

5)     Being Over-Analytic

Many individuals often over think and analyze everything that occurs in their life and surroundings. While their ability to analyze things is a great asset, the constant analysis of everything can often lead to frustration especially when coming up with an undesired conclusion.   Being able to see through people's intentions is a burden that most people do not get to carry. Oftentimes knowing how ugly the real world is like is disappointing and frustrating. Not to mention the timeless dilemmas of global and philosophical issues that seem to have no solution is a constant mental plague.  In this case, ignorant is bliss. 

15 HABITS TO BE HAPPY

15 habits to be happy. People are happy when they practice these habits. Try to implement these habits into your lifestyle so that you feel happy.

1. Gratefulness

If you can wake up and just be grateful about something, you are automatically going to be happier.  If you woke up thinking  ‘ today's going to be a bad day’, ‘the bad things are going to happen’, ‘I am not going to enjoy doing this task’ and ‘I have to hang around these people’, you're obviously not even happy at the start of the day. So how are you going to get happier? If you start your day with gratefulness and positivity, you are already going to be forcing your brain to think of ways to be happier.  Think about those people who are not as fortunate as you are and try to be grateful of the every small thing in your life.

 2. Optimism

Optimism goes with gratefulness. Optimism is having a positive view of the world and the future outcomes of it.  Now it is important to differentiate optimism from realistic optimism. Optimism is like over the top almost blindly looking at things that they are going to be great. Realistic optimism is the balance between taking positive view of the future outcomes and going to get work done realistically. If you can get those gratefulness and optimism together, it is already a great habit to start your day. Just come up with affirmations ‘ today is going to be great’,’ I'm going to get a ton of work done’, ‘I'm going to meet this someone special in my life’ and if I already have them ‘I'm going to care for them even more than yesterday’. 

3. Engage In Pleasant Expectations

Our brain experiences a sensation of pleasure by simply anticipating the amusing event going to happen. That is why we love to count the hours and minutes to some pleasant moment to happen, be it a birthday or a wedding, a reunion with a friends or just an end to a long working day. The process of waiting for something nice like food or travel, gives us a feeling of happiness. So engage in pleasant expectations of happy events in future.

4. Practice to Say Thank You

Learn to say ‘thank you’. When you greet "thank you" to someone, for something, you focus yourselves on the positive aspects of life. Pleasant memories associated with the gratitude activate serotonin production in the anterior cingulate cortex. This technique is commonly practiced for treating depression. Practicing the act of thankfulness has established to increase the level of happiness. Study suggests that a conscious focus on practicing appreciation have emotional and interpersonal benefits.  Practice the act of gratitude or thank giving for simply small things in our life.

5. Smile

Smile a lot. Smiling helps lower stress, increase happiness and boost your mood.  Smiling trigger the part of brain associated with rewards and releases dopamine the happiness hormone. There are many psychological reasoning behind forcing yourself to smile. Put yourself in situations that you know will make you smile. Smiling is a habit of happy people they love putting themselves in situations where they will smile a lot.

6.  Make Friends and Socialize

Make Time for Friends. The important thing about having many friends is to have high-quality friends.  There are many toxic people in the world. Look for friends subjectively, one who is valuable and adds benefit to your life. Choose friends who with stay with you all through your life.  This long-term friendship will help you be exponentially happy because friends have many psychological aspects that help you share, network, and be a happier person. On days when people spend 6-7 hours with friends or family, they are 12 times more likely to feel happy rather than stressed. People who work full-time experience the most happiness on days when they spend 8-9 hours with friends and family – so make the most of your weekends.  In order to be happier in life, you should start socializing. Socializing help you in observing others, get to know new people around, then learn about them. In this way, you will find so many new things to enlarge your understanding of various ideas in life with the purpose of trying to be happier.

7. Touch and Embrace

Touch and embrace, as a part of social interaction is important. Various forms of physical support especially touch and embraces can speed up a person's recovery from an illness. If you remove physical interaction from your life, the brain perceives its absence the way it perceives physical pain. The same brain zones become activated in both instances. The absence of physical touch, in turn, starts the processes that influence your mood and contribute to the development of depression.

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo Buscaglia

8.  Set SMART Goals                                                                                       

Set goals that are achievable and that you can reach in a timely manner so that when you reach them they will boost your motivation. Setting a smart achievable goal not only motivates you but reaching a goal should bring you a lot of joy. It can bring you happiness.  This is one of the habits that happy people have they do not just go through life without goals. Happy people set goals and try their best to achieve the goal. Each time they get them, they get more motivation, more discipline, and more success with each goal.

9. Take a Break

Often take breaks when you work.  A study on 2 group of people was conducted to measure productivity in work place. One group consists of people who did not take breaks at all they had worked for eight hours at a stretch. The other group consists of people who took breaks like ten minutes every hour.  It was found that the people that took breaks every hour actually had less working time but they were happier and their productivity was boosted and they actually got more work done than the people who worked the full eight hours. It is interesting because when you take breaks it gives you time to look forward to and you can be optimistic about that.

10. Solve Problems One at A Time

Your brain never stops searching for solutions to every problem that worries you. This takes a lot of energy, so whenever the brain gets tired and the problem remains unsolved, we feel anxiety and irritation. On the other hand, every time you take the right decision at right time, your brain rewards itself with a dose of dopamine that calms the limbic system, and once again helps you see the world in a better light. Therefore, you must to try to deal with one problem at a time.

11. Do Not Keep Things Pent Up

Talk about what bothers you. Talking about your difficulty involve make the negative emotions have a lesser impact on your well-being. The process of wordlessly going through something unpleasant creates a negative emotional effect in the brain and build up stress and anxiety. In the latter case, negative emotions have a lesser impact on your well-being. It is, therefore, prudent not to keep your problems pent up. Your brain triggers the production of serotonin whenever you talk about them, and even manages to find some positive outcome to the situation.

12. Learn Something New

Acquiring new knowledge, trains the brain to get adapted to a changing environment.

Happy people when they get sad, force themselves to learn something new. Therefore, whenever you get down or sad or interrupt one of the best things I can ever recommend you to do is to learn something new. Now it is important to learn something new that you are curious and passionate about because that will help you to get out of the hard situation of your life. It may be learning new language, music or a new sport that will help you to make new friends. If you want to be happy, do not be afraid to try something new, to change your surroundings, to learn new things.  Learn something new you are passionate helps the creativity in your brain to unlock those new neurons that actually can help your brain be healthier and in turn make you a happier person. Using this process, our brain develops, rewarding its own attempts to absorb and process new information with dopamine, the hormone of joy.

13. Meditate

You might have heard that meditation is very important for happier life. The truth is, yes, meditation not only helps you improve your happiness but also helps to stay focused, improve clarity, increase attention span and calmness. A research conducted on 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation by a team from Massachusetts General Hospital. Studying the brain scans of these 16 people before and after concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants’ brains associated with self-awareness and compassion grew, and parts associated with stress shrank. Meditation is a biological weapon to turn stress into peace and happiness. Start meditating regularly along with yoga and pranayam for long-term happiness and live a happier life.

 14. Get a Good Sleep

Importance of sleep for the quality of our life cannot be underestimated. People spend almost one third of one’s life sleeping. On sleeping in the darkness, our body starts secreting the melatonin hormone. This hormone slows down all the physical and mental processes in the body. Thereby help the body to recover by lowering the level of stress and anxiety.   A quality sleep increases the level of serotonin in the hypothalamus. An afternoon nap desensitized to negative emotions yet more responsive to positive ones. Sleep deprivation cause emotional problems. While good sleep, make people more positive and happier. Therefore, sleep six to eight hours a day, in darkened environments to boost your happiness.

15. Exercise and Play Sports

Physical activity is stress for the body. However, as soon as the stress ends, your body gets a reward, a dose of happiness hormone – ‘endorphins’ secreted by the pituitary gland. The feel good effect of endorphin is similar to that of opiates like, morphine, this reduces pain and elevates the mood. To achieve this result, you do not need to run marathons. Even a regular walk can do wonders. Many writers and composers consider taking walks as an essential part of the creative process.
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