How To Increase Your Happiness

…in a way that actually works:

Putting things in the more useful frame

You probably already know that a popular method is the practice of gratitude. But it can feel hard sometimes, because when we need happiness most is often when we are beset by things that are not obviously giving us cause to feel grateful.

For example, we can’t be grateful for violence, war, oppression, exploitation, loss, or bereavement—which latter is also loss, of course, but deserves its own category.

Sometimes people speak of things having a “silver lining”, but that can feel like it’d be downplaying the badness of the thing. Any circumstances where the adversity was (or is) sufficiently bad, we’d probably gladly pay any “silver lining” to have the situation corrected. So it can be hard to cherish the good, let alone feel grateful for it, in that frame.

But, even in the worst of life, there are things we can feel grateful for. In the case of a bereavement, we might be very averse to the idea of there being any “silver lining”, but what we might be grateful for could be, for example, the love we shared and how we impacted each other’s lives (your writer here is a devoted widow who has to hold herself back by the scruff of the neck from talking at length about this).

In the case of more environmental adversities, we can be grateful for the strength to have faced it and still be alive; we can be grateful for how we (fellow humans) can help each other; we can be grateful for the comforts we can find along the way.

As it has been said, “not every day is good, but there is some good in every day”.

This video offers the following three-step method:

1. Stop: slow down, become quiet, and build pauses into your life, so that you don’t miss the opportunities each moment offers.
2. Look: open your senses to the richness of life and your heart to opportunities to help others and make them happy.
3. Go: act on the opportunities available to you in the present moment.

For less on all of this, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like:

How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

Take care!