Increase Your Happiness in Just 5 Minutes

What’s the secret to happiness? That’s the million dollar question but for just 3 easy payments of $29.99, I’ll tell you the secret. Seriously, there are no secrets. Happiness is just a feeling we each create within ourselves which means you can do it on purpose.

The Plan

Let’s look at this logically. In order for you to have a happy life, you would need to have enough experiences or moments in your life that made you happy.

Does this mean you have to be happy at least 51% of the time? Not necessarily. You could feel like you had a happy life even if you experienced more unhappy moments simply be focusing on the happy moments.

In almost any experience you have, whether it was good or bad will largely depend on what you give your focus to.

You can come back from a vacation and focus on the delayed flight or the hot weather or all the money you spent and instantly feel like it was a bad vacation. On the other hand, you could get a flat tire and focus on the fact that you avoided an accident and feel blessed. It’s all about focus.

The Action

Going back to increasing your happiness, it’s simple: Take 5 minutes a day and do something that makes you happy. That way, when you think back on your day, you’ll have at least one happy moment to easily focus on.

Whether it’s playing an instrument, hanging out with your kids and/or spouse, reading a good book, drawing, taking a bubble bath, working out, feeling grateful, meditating, or anything else, if it makes you happy, you should be doing it more frequently. Just make sure you choose something that actually makes you happy and not something that you know you’re only doing to kill time like watching 5 hours of reality TV.

Many of us live a busy life and with all of the responsibilities we have, it can be easy to fall into a routine that doesn’t bring us any joy. If you look back over the past month or two of your life and have a hard time finding any happy moments, start to create them deliberately.

Waiting for something to come along to make you happy is a formula for unhappiness, frustration, and stress. Understand that you create your own happiness and in order to apply this, you need to schedule that “happiness creation” into your daily or weekly routine.

Of course, 5 minutes is just a minimum. If you’re super busy, start with 5 minutes and increase it as you please.

It Can’t Be That Easy

Some of you reading this may be thinking that this is ridiculous and that being happy is way, way harder than I’m making it out to be. If so, you may want to rethink your definition of happiness.

If you think happiness is achieved by making tons of money or having lots of stuff or having power and fame, then marketers have done a good job in making you believe that happiness is something external. If so, you’ll likely be chasing it for the rest of your life. There’s nothing wrong with wanting more things, in fact, pursuing them will help you grow. However, waiting for those things to happen before you can allow yourself to be happy is going to cost you.

Keep It Simple

Don’t make being happy harder than it really is. Keep it simple. Focus more on the good things in your life and start setting aside some time each day to do something that makes you happy.

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