10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY

10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY

• 1. Slide18 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Practice Smiling Move Closer to Work Sleep Get Outside Have a Good Time Meditate Plan a Trip Help Others Practice Gratitude Exercise
• 2. Slide9 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Exercise Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out the 7-minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules. Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is an effective strategy for overcoming depression. You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.
• 3. Slide12 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Sleep More You'll be less sensitive to negative emotions. We know that sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.
• 4. Slide11 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Get Outside More In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness. A study from the University of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people happier. This is pretty good news for those of us who are worried about fitting new habits into our already-busy schedules.
• 5. Slide10 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Help Others One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. But what about spending our time on other people? In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well- being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives.
• 6. Slide14 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Practice Smiling Smiling can make us feel better, but it's more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study. Of course, it's important to practice "real smiles" where you use your eye sockets. You've seen fake smiles that don't reach the person's eyes. Try it. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a huge difference in a fake smile and a genuine smile.
• 7. Slide13 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Plan a Trip As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy the sense of anticipation. If you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar--even if it's a month or a year down the road. Then, whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.
• 8. Slide5 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Meditate Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity, and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it's also useful for improving your happiness. Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down, it's been often proven to be the single most effective way to live a happier life. According to Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term.
• 9. Slide15 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Move Closer to Work Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it unsurprising that the effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy. We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don't work.
• 10. Slide16 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Practice Gratitude This is a seemingly simple strategy but I've personally found it to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you're grateful for, sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, and going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you. The Journal of Happiness studies published a study that used letters of gratitude to test how being grateful can affect our levels of happiness.
• 11. Slide17 10 Scientific Ways To Be HAPPY Go Back Spend Time With Your Loved Ones Staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying. Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how happy we feel. Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it: «We are happy when we have the family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends»