How to Grow Your Own Happiness

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Research tells us that while about 50% of our happiness is genetically determined and 10% is tied to our circumstances, about 40% of our happiness is influenced by our thoughts, actions and behaviors.  We talked about loving kindness practice being one way we can grow our happiness in the last post. but there are many other proven ways that we can engage in that grow our contentment and delight in life.

One way is to engage deeply with the positive experiences we have when we have them. In Five Essential Skills, Dr. Rick Hanson points out that while negative experiences register immediately in our memory (part of our survival mechanism), positive experiences need to be held in our awareness between 5-20 seconds for them to fully register in our emotional memory.

Dr. Hanson  believes we need to balance out this negativity bias built into our system through consciously embedding positive experiences. He notes that one negative experience will outweigh a thousand positive ones. For those of us that are healing from any traumatic experience, understanding this is key to finding our way out of the pain and suffering. It is also a powerful way to grow our own happiness. If one traumatic experience is registered immediately and it takes a thousand positive ones to counterbalance it, then consciously drinking in the positive ones for extended periods can be used as a way to heal the trauma and find our way to greater happiness.

Mindfulness practices help grow our capacity to drink in the good by bringing our focus and attention to our physical and emotional body experiences as they happen. When something good occurs--and it can be something as simple as beholding a flower we find pleasant--bringing our attention to the details of the situation as well as our emotional reaction and physical sensations is the best thing we can do to embed the experience in our memory.

There are many simple pleasant experiences we can work with every day such as hearing the sound of birds or the breeze in the trees, a beautiful image or scene, the taste of a simple fruit, or seeing a friend or loved one. We can also intentionally build in experiences that bring good feelings and savor them for as long as we can by relaxing into the moment and laying aside any doubts and concerns.

Here are a few more proven ways to increase your happiness:

• Spend time in nurturing relationships -
  
• Spend time in nature
• Reach out for new experiences
• Practice gratitude - regularly think of things you are grateful for throughout your day
• Help others - it always feels good to help others when the help can be given freely
• Share the good experiences - you'll be uplifted and you'll uplift another
• Practice loving kindness meditation (To download a free guided version of this practice, subscribe to Mindful Intentions.)
• Find meaning for you in life - (Some of my deepest despairing moments are when I don't feel I have purpose in life or are not contributing to something meaningful to me.)

While the odds seem so stacked against us, given the way our brain and body works with negative experiences, we do have a lot of influence over our happiness through our own thoughts and actions. We can actually begin today by just reveling in the positive experiences we already have. We can also get more strategic and grow our pleasant experiences through simple ways. I invite you to join in on the challenges for this week:

• Create a list of experiences that you know would bring you joy and commit to doing at least one of them this week.
• Create a list of experiences that you THINK might bring you joy and commit to doing at least one of them in the next two weeks.
• INQUIRY: What could I do to create more meaning in my life? Can I begin any of these in the next few weeks?
  

Post what you discovered below so we can all learn new ways to grow our own happiness!