How to be happy

To address the disconnect between happiness and deeper levels of satisfaction, researches proposed a model that characterizes people as falling into one of four well-being types.

1. Optimizing one’s positive emotions, and denying the reality of their negative experiences.
2. Feeling unhappy seeing the complexity of the world around them, and neglecting the positive aspects.
3. Having a generally negative view of themselves and the world.
4. Having a generally positive and empathetic view of the world.

Being happy means more than feeling good. True happiness comes from handling challenging and adverse situations, while collaborating and building lifelong bonds with the people in our lives.

A collective thinking process, where the good of all is considered leads to a level of happiness that cannot be attained by being selfish or self-concerned.

• They surround themselves with other happy people.
• They cultivate resilience.
• They appreciate simple pleasures.
• They devote some of their time to giving.
• They get immersed in activities that bring joy.
• They nix the small talk for deeper conversations. 
• They make a point to listen. 
• They look on the bright side.
• They make exercise a priority.
• They listen to good music.
• They spend time in nature.
• They laugh a lot.

• Faith doesn’t mean any faith in particular. Just find a structure through which you can contemplate life’s deeper questions.
• When it comes to your family and friendships and how they should be, just cultivate and maintain loving, faithful relationships. There is no magic formula.
• What makes work meaningful is not the kind of work it is, but the sense it gives you that you are earning your success and serving others.

Happiness seekers have to go beyond the notions of good or bad and learn to accept things as they are.

A mature approach to happiness is to focus less on the circumstances that make people happy, and more on how people can achieve happiness in uncertain and insecure conditions too.

The connection between guilt and pleasure could be powerful for marketers. Appealing to a negative attribute that is connected to pleasure can be more effective at persuading people than directly talking about positive attributes.

We may think our choices are rational, but the things we think or feel in the moment affect our preferences. In a study, giving respondents a choice of donating $5 to charity or using it for a Starbucks espresso drink, the likelihood and amount of donations increased, compared to a second group who had to choose between a charitable donation and a $5 laundry detergent.

Self-Reliance is the topic (and title) of an 1841 essay from US philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He argues strongly that self-reliance, self-trust, and individualism, amongst other things, are ways that we can avoid the conformity imposed upon us.

• Thinking independently: The ability to think autonomously goes hand in hand with trusting your own instinct.
• Embracing your individuality.
• Striving towards your own goals, bravely.

It’s important to remember that self-reliance is not about cutting yourself off from everybody.

In a fundamental sense, workplace happiness comes when:

• We enjoy doing the tasks assigned to us
• We feel right about the people we are working with
• We are happy with the financial benefits we get from the job
• We have the scope of improving our existing skills
• We feel respected and acknowledged at work

Happy employees are compulsory for a growing business.

A study on organizational success revealed that employees who feel happy in the workplace are 65% more energetic than employees who don’t. They are two times more productive and are more likely to sustain their jobs over a long period of time.

In a way, depression is our way of reacting, withdrawing, and possibly metaphorically recharging our batteries.

There's so much pressure in modern society to perform and be productive, to be efficient, that we don't get time to recharge. This leads to sadness and loss of energy.

We should stop trying to adjust people to circumstances that are not worth being adjusted to. If people suffer from stress in an organization, try to look at how work is organized and change it, instead of referring them to something like stress coaching, or psychotherapies or mindfulness exercises that are really just treating symptoms.

These sensitive, intelligent, resourceful people should be out changing the world, not just sitting in therapy rooms trying to improve themselves.

"Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love."  - Thich Nhat Hanh

"… The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all."  - Thich Nhat Hanh

In these times of confusion, when the best experts are clueless, the right choice is no longer a simple task but can require lots of effort.

Being without work also robs us of our daily motivations and the good parts of our job, like positive customer feedback or our feeling of being valued and wanted.

They unload our minds from our constant decision making, and provide us with ways to relax.

We have a finite amount of energy for solving the daily problems, as our attention is a resource that can be exhausted, making decisions harder as the day goes by.