We all want to feel happy, and each one of us has different ways of getting there. Here are 5 steps that you can take to increase your joie de vivre and bring more happiness into your life.

The 5 Keys To Happiness 

Every second you waste waiting for happiness is a second you could have been using to create it. The happiest people aren’t the luckiest, wealthiest, or best-looking; the happiest people are those who make an effort to be happy. If you want to create your own happiness, you have to start by making it a priority. We work so hard to avoid letting other people down, but we so often do so at the expense of our own happiness.

Don't Wait The happiness, Create It

Happiness is contagious. Surrounding yourself with happy people builds confidence and stimulates creativity, and it’s flat-out fun. Hanging around negative people has the opposite effect—they want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. Think of it this way: If a person were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke?

Choose Your Surroundings Carefully

I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to improving your mood, focus, and self-control. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, removing toxic proteins that accumulate during the day as byproducts of normal neuronal activity. This ensures that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your energy, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough quality sleep. Happy people make sleep a priority, because it makes them feel great and they know how lousy they feel when they’re sleep deprived.

Sleep 

Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23 percent. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy and physical well-being. It’s likely that lower levels of cortisol played a major role in this.

Appreciate what you have.

<ul><li>Meaning. Begin with the end in the mind. Seligman recommends that we think about our own death. What do you want to accomplish before you die? What are you doing today to help achieve your long term goals? This exercise adds focus and a sense of urgency to our very short lives.</li><li>Achievement. This is about persistence and resiliency, not simply obtaining some goal. Happy people make lots of mistakes but continue when confronted with failure and frustration.</li></ul>

The 5 keys to Happiness

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