8 Habits of Happy People
By: Cosmin Angheluta
Tags: Happiness, Self Improvement, Happy, Happiness In Life, Self Love

As you can see these three types of life of happiness are not a real choice, but levels. You can decide to upgrade yourself from a level to another, based on the kind of happiness you want to reach in your life. Many people remain in the pleasure life level, while most of the population remains in the engagement life level, living a pretty ordinary life. Only a few can access the empowerment that comes from spiritual life, and those people are the only minority that experienced happiness in all its forms.

Now, besides the choice you are going to make, there are some good habits that happy people perform in order to have a life worth living. I will list some, hoping this will help you build your own happiness.

1. Surround yourself with happy people

It is pretty intuitive that if you surround yourself with happy people your happiness will grow as a natural consequence. Living inside a protected and joyful environment could be nothing but beneficial for your happiness.

Furthermore, being in a harmonious company will help you to stop thinking about the negative events in your life faster. If you are dealing with a breakup, for example, having positive energy around yourself will make the difference.

2. Cultivate resilience

Resilience is the capacity of recovering quickly from a painful situation. Cultivating resilience will make you less influenced by external events that could ruin your mood. It will allow you to ignore everything that is not worth your attention and focus on the things that make you happy.

Also, by becoming a resilient person, you would understand easily that pain is a necessary and unavoidable event in your life, but how much it lasts is up to you.

3. Appreciate simple pleasures

In your life, you will experience a few big exciting and marvelous events and many little joyful ones. What you have to understand is that big special emotions won’t repeat over and over again, or they won’t be that special anymore.

So learn to enjoy the little recursive feelings and blessings of your everyday life. Learn to enjoy your friends’ company, your partner’s time, or the hours you spend playing with your kids. Those are the little things that end up building our days, our lives, and overall our happiness.

4. Devote some time to giving

As human beings, since we were born, we learned to focus and take care of ourselves. Building a social position, earning enough money to start a family, and finding success, were our goals, but we were rarely thought to give to others.

Not every one of us feels like donating, or helping other people, but it has been proven that giving your time or your resources to others will bring you a new kind of joy you cannot experience in any other way.

Think about helping an old lady crossing the road, or giving some helpful information to a couple of tourists that stopped you because they got lost. Don’t you feel like you were useful to somebody for a change?

That feeling is the key to access the life of spirit I talked about at the beginning. Learn to give to others, learn to help others, and you will experience an increase of joy and happiness in your everyday life.

5. Have deep conversations

Being able to develop deep conversations is the most underrated ability nowadays, but this practice is a gold mine. If you learn to use it and find the right person that can keep the momentum, dive deep into the conversation with you, and meet you on the same level, it’s like winning the lottery.

The benefits that come from having deep conversations are multiple: firstly, you get to know better the other party, and secondly, you get to know better yourself too.

Think about it: sometimes you don’t know what are your beliefs on an argument until you will find the person that challenges those hidden beliefs. Furthermore, by having deep conversations you will learn to develop an open mind. Exposing your thoughts to another person that could have different opinions from yours could be revelatory.

6. Listen to people

If you try to observe your social life you will notice that there are some people with whom you talk a lot, like… A LOT. You expose them to your thoughts, asking them for pieces of advice. You feed them your enthusiasm for life and your deepest pains, depending on how you are currently feeling, and they listen.

Then there are people that you tend to listen more, not because you don’t trust them, it’s only that the dynamic differs. You become more of a motivator, nourishing them with kindness and understanding.

This balance is very important in your life. You want to have someone you can tell everything and be sure they will advise you right, but you also need to have somebody that teaches you to listen. Keeping your mouth shut is a powerful tool since it trains you into understanding on a deeper level your environment, and your relationships, so as to separate the good ones from the bad ones.

Moreover, by listening to people you show real interest in them. In the long run, this will improve your relationships since people like to be listened to and possibly understood.

7. Look at the bright side of things

Sometimes, when you feel low, you start seeing the negatives of everything. The problem is that negativity acts circularly, and the more you think in a negative way, the more that negativity will become stronger. In a short amount of time stopping that behavior becomes impossible, and your happiness will get seriously hurt.

There are many techniques used to destroy that vicious cycle, but one helped me the most when I went through one of the most painful periods of my life. I call it Negativity Balance.

What is it about? Simple.

For every negative thought you identify in your thinking process you have to instantly balance it with a positive one.

Let’s say, for example, you broke up, and you feel like you are worthless. When you identify that concern immediately think about a positive event opposed to that. Remember the last time you made that friend of yours smile? You were worth it, weren’t you?

This balancing will help you keep a neutral mood and eventually, when the pain will stop, improve your happiness.

8. Make exercise a priority in your life

Everyone knows nowadays that exercising brings happiness. Why so? Practically because of two factors: one is more chemical-based, while the other one is more of a psychological effect.

First of all, when you exercise your brain and central nervous system start producing endorphins, which are then released in your body. These hormones are useful to reduce the transmission of muscular pain in your body caused by the effort you’re making. As a collateral effect, you will also feel a sensation of euphoria, which will last for quite an amount of time, giving you the sensation of “feeling good” after you exercise.

Also, in the long run, exercising will give you the chance to stay fit, and this will improve your confidence, your motivation, and by chain effect your happiness.