How to be Intentionally Happy

What makes you happy?

Money? The newest iPhone? The good health of your family? A promotion at work? Some interesting work by University of California, Riverside researcher Sonja Lyubomirskynot only suggests where our happiness comes from, but shows how to get more of it.

Pieces of the happiness pie

Dr. Lyubomirsky proposes that there are three components to happiness:

• A genetically-based “happiness set point”
• Life circumstances
• Intentional activities and practices.

She has broken these three areas into percentages regarding how much they are responsible for your happiness.

Although the variability of the happiness set point is currently undergoing more research, Lyubomirsky cites studies that indicate the set point is responsible for 50% of your overall happiness.

Life circumstances – things like the aforementioned iPhone, family health, and work promotion – account for only 10% of your happiness.

That leaves intentional activities aimed toward positive emotion providing you with 40% of your happiness quotient.

Now, here are a couple of important things to know:

• Your happiness set point is genetic and therefore impervious to change. The theory is that no matter what happens – good or bad – you tend to eventually settle back into your inherited level of happiness. So, there’s no use trying to make an impact on your happiness set point.
• You could try to improve your life circumstances by getting more stuff, striving for career goals, and finding the perfect partner. But not only do life circumstances only account for a small percentage of your happiness, they are subject to a very human process:hedonic adaptation. In a nutshell, this means that we very quickly adapt to new things in our lives, so our happiness about it is short-lived.

Taking action toward happiness

So that leaves us with intentional activities as the remaining piece of the happiness pie, a piece that creates 40% of our well-being. Lyubomirsky believes it is this component that we have the most control over and that allows us to take action rather than merely reactwhen it comes to creating happiness.

So what are these activities that promote positive emotions and well-being? Lyubomirsky suggests three well-researched practices:

1. Committing acts of kindness. Doing nice things for others tends to up your happiness quotient. Curiously, Lyubomirsky found that doing several acts of kindness on the same day – rather than spreading them out through the week – generated the greatest jump in well-being.

2. Expressing gratitude and optimism. Keeping a list of things you are grateful for really does help make you happier. An intriguing note on this component is the discovery that making a list one time per week created a greater boost in happiness than making lists three or more times per week.

3. Processing happy and unhappy life experiences. This is where it really gets interesting. It turns out that talking or writing about your life experiences is helpful in only one of these conditions: the negative experiences.

Why? Apparently, talking to a friend or writing about difficult times in your life helps you to create a story and structure around the event, an act which helps you make sense of it and adjust to the experience more easily.

Positive experiences, however, generate more happiness if they are thought about privately. This allows you to savor and re-experience them without having to analyze them. It’s perfectly fine to talk with others about great things that happen to you as this will brighten your friend’s day, too.  But be sure to remember and relish those good events in your life in your private time, too.

What makes you happy? Slice yourself a bigger piece of the happiness pie using intentional activities. You’ll be happy you did.

Psychotherapist Bobbi Emel specializes in helping people face life’s significant challenges and regain their resiliency. In addition to seeing clients in her private practice, Bobbi is a well-regarded speaker and writer. You can find her blog at http://www.TheBounceBlog.com

Written by Bobbi Emel 
Categories: self improvement

How To Motivate Yourself – Self Motivation

How To Motivate Yourself – Self Motivation

Written by Editor in Chief, Pick The Brain
Categories: motivation

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Staying motivated is a struggle — our drive is constantly assaulted by negative thoughts and anxiety about the future. Everyone faces doubt and depression. What separates the highly successful is the ability to keep moving forward.

There is no simple solution for a lack of motivation. Even after beating it, the problem reappears at the first sign of failure. The key is understanding your thoughts and how they drive your emotions. By learning how to nurture motivating thoughts, neutralize negative ones, and focus on the task at hand, you can pull yourself out of a slump before it gains momentum.

Reasons We Lose Motivation

There are 3 primary reasons we lose motivation.

1. Lack of confidence – If you don’t believe you can succeed, what’s the point in trying?
2. Lack of focus – If you don’t know what you want, do you really want anything?
3. Lack of direction – If you don’t know what to do, how can you be motivated to do it?

How to Boost Confidence

The first motivation killer is a lack of confidence. When this happens to me, it’s usually because I’m focusing entirely on what I want and neglecting what I already have. When you only think about what you want, your mind creates explanations for why you aren’t getting it. This creates negative thoughts. Past failures, bad breaks, and personal weaknesses dominate your mind. You become jealous of your competitors and start making excuses for why you can’t succeed. In this state, you tend to make a bad impression, assume the worst about others, and lose self confidence.

The way to get out of this thought pattern is to focus on gratitude. Set aside time to focus on everything positive in your life. Make a mental list of your strengths, past successes, and current advantages. We tend to take our strengths for granted and dwell on our failures. By making an effort to feel grateful, you’ll realize how competent and successful you already are. This will rejuvenate your confidence and get you motivated to build on your current success.

It might sound strange that repeating things you already know can improve your mindset, but it’s amazingly effective. The mind distorts reality to confirm what it wants to believe. The more negatively you think, the more examples your mind will discover to confirm that belief. When you truly believe that you deserve success, your mind will generate ways to achieve it. The best way to bring success to yourself is to genuinely desire to create value for the rest of the world.

Developing Tangible Focus

The second motivation killer is a lack of focus. How often do you focus on what you don’t want, rather than on a concrete goal? We normally think in terms of fear. I’m afraid of being poor. I’m afraid no one will respect me. I’m afraid of being alone. The problem with this type of thinking is that fear alone isn’t actionable. Instead of doing something about our fear, it feeds on itself and drains our motivation.

If you’re caught up in fear based thinking, the first step is focusing that energy on a well defined goal. By defining a goal, you automatically define a set of actions. If you have a fear of poverty, create a plan to increase your income. It could be going back to school, obtaining a higher paying job, or developing a profitable website. The key is moving from an intangible desire to concrete, measurable steps.

By focusing your mind on a positive goal instead of an ambiguous fear, you put your brain to work. It instantly begins devising a plan for success. Instead of worrying about the future you start to do something about it. This is the first step in motivating yourself to take action. When know what you want, you become motivated to take action.

Developing Direction

The final piece in the motivational puzzle is direction. If focus means having an ultimate goal, direction is having a day-to-day strategy to achieve it. A lack of direction kills motivation because without an obvious next action we succumb to procrastination. An example of this is a person who wants to have a popular blog, but who spends more time reading posts about blogging than actually writing articles.

The key to finding direction is identifying the activities that lead to success. For every goal, there are activities that pay off and those that don’t. Make a list of all your activities and arrange them based on results. Then make a make an action plan that focuses on the activities that lead to big returns. To continue the example from above, a blogger’s list would look something like this:

1. Write content
2. Research relevant topics
3. Network with other bloggers
4. Optimize design and ad placements
5. Answer comments and email
6. Read other blogs

Keeping track of your most important tasks will direct your energy towards success. Without a constant reminder, it’s easy to waste entire days on filler activities like reading RSS feeds, email, and random web surfing.

When my motivation starts to wane, I regain direction by creating a plan that contains two positive actions. The first one should be a small task you’ve been meaning to do, while the second should be a long-term goal. I immediately do the smaller task. This creates positive momentum. After that I take the first step towards achieving the long-term goal. Doing this periodically is great for getting out of a slump, creating positive reinforcement, and getting long-term plans moving.

It’s inevitable that you’ll encounter periods of low energy, bad luck, and even the occasional failure. If you don’t discipline your mind, these minor speed bumps can turn into mental monsters. By being on guard against the top 3 motivation killers you can preserve your motivation and propel yourself to success.

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/how-to-motivate-yourself/