As I’ve said before, happiness is a choice. In this guest post by Carmen Jacob, the author provides some tips on how to increase our level of happiness.

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How to Increase Your Default Level of Happiness

By Carmen Jacob

Can you count how many books, courses, and other programs get on the market every single day promising you more happiness? Do you believe them? Do you follow their advice?

You have a unique default level of happiness. No matter how things are going in your life, you will get back at that level again and again. This fact is excellent news because that means that you can face any situation and get out of it still happy.

So, could you be happier? Yes, for brief moments you can. For brief moments you are sad as well, are you not?

As your happiness level returns again and again to your default level, so does your sadness. That means to be in balance.

Why?

1.Our mind works by making statistics and comparisons.

You can’t measure the value of something if you have nothing to compare it.

If you were incredibly happy all the time, you would not know it, appreciate it, notice it.

2. Your unconscious mind wants you to grow and improve yourself.

There is a good reason why we are not perfect. What a boring world would that be! No purpose, no aspirations, no dreams.

Necessity drives learning, improvement, discoveries, creativity and growth. Therefore, you need to have less happy moments too.

3. It improves your power to relate to other people.

Your difficult times are teaching you about others more than your happy times. When do you understand better the struggle of somebody else and offer a helping hand? When you have, live it yourself.

Now, Do you want to be happier? Then you need to increase your default level of happiness and here are a few things that you can do to about it.

But first, how did you get that default level?

• Nature – your genes can make predisposed to see more the positive part of life or more the negative one.
• Nurture – the experiences from your childhood.

How to increase your default level of happiness:

1.Overcome your genetic predisposition.

Train your mind to notice, search, focus and pay attention to the positive side of things. Your brain is plastic; therefore, you have the ability to shape your thoughts as you please through practice, persistence, and patience.

2. Improve your environment.

Surround yourself with positive people and use their example. Model how they behave in situations that you find most difficult to keep your mind on positive. Allow them to enrich your life with their positive attitude.

Live in a place that you feel supported, accepted, loved, appreciated and safe.

3. Be willing to challenge your beliefs that are having an adverse impact on your well-being.

For example, a low self-esteem can cause you to hold many untrue beliefs about yourself, your abilities and skills.

4. Change your past.

It sounds impossible. Right? However, you can change your past:

• you can change how you feel about it
• you can alter the meaning of certain situations
• you can redefine what to allow to influence you the most out of past.

The best thing about the past is that has already happened. It is yours; you can do whatever you please with it. The facts about your past are set in stone; the way you feel about it, your perception of it are not fixed, they are in your power to model.

5. Accept yourself as you are.

Accepting yourself as you are at every moment in time, gives you the time, energy and love you grow, to improve yourself knowing that whatever positive traits you add to your character and knowledge is a bonus. Therefore, there is no pressure to be different.

When people feel the need for a change, at first, they resist to it because you see? We like ourselves. We are born to like, love and appreciate who we are. Otherwise, life would be a never ending struggle and pain, conflicting feelings about self and resentment for others happiness.

Increasing your default level of happiness is not about a momentary burst of feeling happy; it is about reshaping the way you think and believe, reevaluating your values and the effectiveness of your behavior so that your general well-being is most of the time on positive.

About the Author

Carmen Jacob believes that we are all good by nature, and giving the knowledge, the chance and the opportunity, we will prove to ourselves and to others how extraordinary and capable every person can be.

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