How can you increase the amount of happiness you feel in your life, every day? By following a few simple guidelines we got from the folks at Prevention magazine.
• For starters: Strive for small changes rather than big ones. Research shows that even major life events, such as winning the lottery, hardly affect people’s overall sense of satisfaction. So think smaller. Daniel Mochon is a psychologist at Yale University, and he says the little things we do daily – like exercising or attending religious services – have a major impact on our happiness. In one study, he found that people leaving religious services felt happier than those going in. The more regularly they attended, the happier they felt overall. The same is true for exercise. People not only feel happier after exercising, they also get a bigger boost the more often they do it.
• Next: From work, to health, to relationships – we have choices about where we concentrate our attention. So, when bad weather makes your commute to the office impossible, do you choose to focus on how behind you’ll be tomorrow – or on the eight-hour gift you’ve just been given? Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. She says the answers to questions like this have a big influence on our well-being. Studies show that focusing on positive emotions – like curiosity instead of fear, and compassion instead of anger – broadens your mind and keeps negative feelings at bay, which is better for your cardiovascular system. In general, optimistic people have fewer health problems and live longer than pessimists.
No comments:
Post a Comment