I'm doing a lot of speaking and talking about habits, which is this subject that obsesses me. That's a lot of fun.
If you're a night person you can barely get out of bed in time to get to work or get your kids off to school. You're at your most productive and creative much later in the day, and for you, something like getting up early to go for a run is not going to set you up for success because you're not a morning person.
You really have to begin by figuring out what kind of person you are. The tip is to really take a look at yourself.
I think the big myth about habits, and happiness too, is that there's somehow a magic "one size fits all" solution. That, "If it works for you it's going to work for me," and it's just a matter of figuring out what that habit would be, whether that's do it first thing in the morning, or start small, or do it for thirty days, or give yourself a cheat day.
What I found is, really, you always have to begin by nailing what is true about you, because something that works very well for someone else might not work for you at all.
I spend a lot of time saying to myself, "Well, is that really what I like to do? Is that really something that makes me happy?" and letting go of the things that don't make me happy.
Think about what kind of person you are and shape your habits, and your happiness, to show what's true about you instead of thinking that you can just import the right answer from the outside.
Self-knowledge makes me happy.
One of the things that surprised me the most is how often we assume that because something's fun for someone else, it makes somebody else happy, it will make us happy.
Relationships make me happy.
Reading makes me happy.
Writing makes me happy.
Reading makes me want to write my own books, and just trying to understand what I see in the world around me makes me want to figure things out.
The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.
Your unhappiness doesn't help anyone else - and in fact, as I mentioned in another answer, happy people are more altruistically inclined. So happiness is not a selfish goal.
One of the findings that really interests me is that, although we think we ACT because of the way we FEEL, we often FEEL because of the way we ACT. So an almost uncanny way to change your feelings is to act the way you WISH you felt.
If you want to feel safe, healthy, and hopeful, try to act as if you did feel that way. "Fake it 'till you feel it." maybe start with health -- try to walk energetically, speak energetically, do physical things.
Turns out that people who try new things, go new places, learn new skills, etc. are happier. This can be tough, because novelty and challenge also bring frustration and irritation - but if you can push through that, novelty and challenge can bring enormous happiness rewards.
I'm a creature of routine, and I hate feeling incompetent, so I avoided novelty and challenge. Making an effort to push myself in that way has brought me surprising boost.
Happiness can seem like an abstract, transcendent notion, but in fact, I found that getting enough sleep (very important!!), getting exercise, not letting myself get too hungry, not letting myself get too cold (I'm a person who is always cold), made a big difference. Partly because I felt happier, partly because feeling physically comfortable makes it easier to keep other difficult happiness-boosting resolutions like biting my tongue.
In general, religious people seem to be happier than non-religious people - under various definitions of "religiosity," such as church attendance or professed spiritual beliefs.
People in religions that teach that believers in other faiths are condemned, for example, tend to have lower life satisfaction. People who believe in heaven and hell tend to be less happy than those believe only in heaven.
I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.
It's true that people do assume that people who are critical are smarter than people who are uncritical.
Happiness is hard because it's very subjective. I know the people that seem happiest to me, but whether they are actually - what they're really like inside is really hard to say.
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