How to Be Happier Every Day

Busyness, fear, bad news, world events, your boss that never gives you credit for your brilliant ideas — it seems like daily we face situations that threaten to steal our happiness. For something that we imagine should come naturally, it’s often surprising that we must fight to be happy.

Learning how to be happier every day begins with understanding that being happy doesn’t mean the absence of frustrating circumstances. It means we allow ourselves to revel in the good times and to cope with the bad times in the most effective way possible.

HAPPINESS IS A WORTHY GOAL AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR For most of us, feeling happy isn’t our natural set point. In our survival brains, we have learned to see what is wrong in the world, to stay on high alert for danger, to prepare for the bad things to come. But happiness is a worthy goal and one worth fighting for, a goal that can be achieved by simply making the decision to be happier and live a happier life.

Much of our happiness comes down to our daily choices. Throughout our life we unknowingly develop habits that directly impact our personal happiness. These habits are often small choices, actions, or thought patterns that keep our happy meters on empty. Let me explain.

HAPPINESS THIEVES My friend, Julie, a glass-half-empty kind of girl by her own admission, went on a personal quest to identify the things in her life that were stealing her happiness. Though it took some work to discover them, she learned the three biggest happiness thieves in her life were saying yes to things she didn’t want to do in order to avoid disappointing others, comparing her real life to others' life highlights on social media, and thinking of herself as powerless to overcome difficult situations (the “it’s never going to get better” mindset).

Julie quickly realized how much power these seemingly small habits had in stealing her happiness and created a plan to overcome them. For a month, she kept a sticky note on her bathroom mirror with her list of truths she would use to combat the happiness thieves in her life. She read them aloud each and every day. Her truths were:

I give myself permission to say no. Social media is not real life. I can do hard things.

Any time she caught herself doing, speaking, or thinking any of the things she’d identified as happiness thieves, she’d speak truth.

What we can’t see, we can’t overcome. But once we are aware of the happiness thieves in our lives, we can create systems and processes that give those thieves the boot! (Y’all know I love a good system!)

HAPPINESS BUILDING BLOCKS In addition to identifying our own happiness thieves, we must also understand the essentials to a happy life. Researchers have proven that there are two key elements that build a happy life: the quality of our relationships and the habit of gratitude.

THE POWER OF RELATIONSHIPS Harvard happiness researcher, Daniel Gilbert, says, “We are happy when we have 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.”

The happiest people are those who invest in relationships. Start intentionally investing in your relationships by spending more time with your family, taking a coworker out to lunch, joining a social group, or a book club - whatever you enjoy, go find people who enjoy it too!

THE POWER OF GRATITUDE Positive psychology research has consistently shown a happier life to be associated with gratitude. Gratitude is the secret to releasing serotonin (the happy hormone), enjoying good experiences, overcoming stress, and building better relationships.

In our family, we have made it a habit to share our "three wins" for the day. It would be easy to focus on what didn’t go well, but by sharing our three good memories, we are practicing gratitude and savoring what makes us happy.

Some additional ways you can cultivate gratitude in your life are keeping a gratitude journal, sending thank you notes, and regularly thinking about things in life that you are grateful for.

Abraham Lincoln said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” If you want to be happier every day, identify your happiness thieves, spend time developing the relationships in your life, and make the decision to be grateful, every day, for something.

Words by Alli Worthington