Happiness is a Habit
“Cheer Up.” “Be Happy.” How many times has someone said that to you?
Your response is “Uh, OK. How?”
For those folks who think happiness is an emotion out of their control, I have good news for you. You can increase your amount of happiness. Choosing happiness can be a positive habit.
At my High School graduation party, a guest asked me what I wanted to be. I replied, “I’m going to be happy.”
At the time, I had no idea what that entailed or how I could achieve happiness. I wanted to know why other people were happy, and to figure out how I could be. I saw varying degrees of happiness round me. I looked for a correlation between happiness and life events. Some folks were happy that were thin; some were happy and rotund. Some people were happy without lots of money and some people where unhappy with lots of money. Some married folks were happy, some married folks were unhappy. You get the idea. At some point, I thought that maybe, just maybe, happiness doesn’t come from external events, life situations and things.
That started me studying emotions and how I could create happiness. I even took a University class on “The Good Life”.
What I discovered was that the good life is subjective – everyone has their own definition of what is good, and that happiness doesn’t come from external events.
Researchers have found that no matter what happens to you in life, you return to a certain range of happiness. You have a happiness set point, like your weight set point. It’s 50% genetic and 50% learned. So half of the reason people are happy is that they were born that way, and half because of what you are thinking, feeling, and believing. I learned that my happiness set point was changeable. Thus, marriage, money, health were not necessarily the catalysts to happiness. I was. I could control my 50% of the happiness set point.
Wow – that was scary, that I was accountable for my own happiness. I thought I was a responsible person: paying bills on time, doing the best I could at work. Now I had to be responsible for my own happiness, too. How could I do that and juggle a job, night school, family life, volunteer activities, taking care of myself, plus making myself happy?
It was really very simple. Happiness is a choice. It’s a habit. Like any other habit, you can develop it with a bit of effort.
There are many books, seminars, coaching and programs to help you change your happiness set point, and increase your happiness. One of the best I have found is The Happy For No Reason paraliminal CD, produced by Learning Strategies Corporation in Minneapolis, MN. You listen with stereo headphones, and you can easily acquire new behaviors and form new, positive habits. Paraliminals are created using breakthrough technologies of neurolinguistic programming and whole brain learning. Using the Happy for No Reason paraliminal, I was guided from the inside out to make happiness a habit. It was easy and fun. When I need a happiness recharge, all I do is listen again.
I knew it was working when a co-worker from a separate division said to me one day, “Are you the kind of person who is always happy?”
“Yeah”, I replied. “I have a happiness habit.”
Learn how to be happy with the Happy for No Reason Paraliminal from Learning Strategies Corporation.
For a complete course in how to be happy with Marci Shimoff, check out: