5 Tips for Achieving Sustainable Happiness

Let?s face it: the pick-up industry is filled with superficial shortcuts to give girls the illusion that we are happy. Everything from routines to body language can be learned and utilized to help us gloss over our insecurities. Although it might work at first, unless we have the inner happiness to back it up, we?re just painting over the cracks.

There are more benefits to being happy than just improving your inner game. Happiness makes us think more clearly and can even improve our physical health. It?s clear to see that both of these consequences of happiness can have a positive impact on your outer game, too.

With that in mind, here are my top 5 tips for achieving sustainable happiness:

1. Smile

As you are probably be aware, our physical and mental states are very much inter-linked. Small changes to our physiology can make huge improvements to our mental well-being.

We smile when we are happy, so by making ourselves smile, we can elicit feelings of happiness. However, a forced grin is unlikely to make you feel any better. If anything, it might make you feel a bit daft. So when you carry out the following exercise, use a smile triggered by a funny or pleasant memory or thought. That way it will be natural and will produce those all-important endorphins that are key to happiness.

1. Set your watch to go off every hour

2. When you hear the beep, sit up straight. An upright posture also helps to improve your happiness

3. Trigger that natural, toothy smile and hold it for around 30 seconds.

4. Feel better!

2. Spend your money on experiences, not items.

Retail therapy can seem like a good idea when you?re feeling down, but research has shown that the rewards are short lasting. A much wiser use of your money is to spend it on experiences that will create positive memories. You don?t have to go mad, either. Although a bungee jump would be an amazing experience, a trip to the cinema would also be rewarding (and a lot better on the wallet).

3. Reframe negative experiences

Bad things happen to everyone from time to time, and it?s easy (and natural) to let those things get you down. But by reframing negative experiences, you can learn to move on a lot more quickly.

Take gaming. Many of us see it as going one for two ways: good (we get a positive response) or bad (we get rejected). But if you think about it, there?s actually a lot more to it that that. Each experience teaches us something, even if it?s as simple as avoiding certain topics or routines.

Confidence coach Marcus Oakey even suggests reframing encounters as either ?good? or ?funny?. It makes sense, really. There isn?t anything that bad about being rejected once you?ve experienced it enough times. If anything, it can be quite amusing if you don?t take it (or yourself) too seriously.

One quick exercise I suggest you try out is to consider what your ?best mistake? ever was. We all fuck up now and again, but often these ?mistakes? lead to new opportunities that shaped the people we are today. Maybe you got fired from a job and ended up meeting an amazing girl on your way to the job. Or perhaps you failed an exam only to end up on a much more rewarding educational path.

4. Be responsible for your own happiness

I guess this is an extension of what is often referred to as being ?non-reactive?, and it is a good habit to get into. As soon as you stop relying on external factors to control your happiness, you?ll find that happiness is a lot more sustainable.

A study by Kenneth Sheldon and Sonja Lyubirsky backs this up. In their experiment they asked two groups of participants to measure their levels of happiness. The first group had experienced a rise in their happiness due to ?circumstantial change?, such as moving house or getting a pay rise. The second group had experienced ?intentional change?, by changing careers or starting a new hobby.

The participants continued to chart their happiness levels for several weeks and by the end a surprising result had emerged. The group who had experienced intentional change remained happier for a lot longer. The researchers concluded that the circumstantial change group had suffered from ?hedonistic habituation?, where their familiarity with the new source of happiness meant that their positive feelings soon faded away. In the case of the intentional change group, the constant flood of positive emotions they?d experienced caused a much longer-lasting state of happiness.

So if you want to stay happier for longer, get out of your comfort zone and try something new.

5. Give a little, get a lot

I don?t necessarily mean that you have to give people money to feel better about yourself (although if you feel like doing so, my contact details are above), but by simply giving something to those in need (be it physical or emotional), you can give yourself a boost in happiness, too.

This isn?t just a load of wishy-washy hippy nonsense, either. Science has shown that two regions deep within the brain (the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens, in case you were wondering) become more active when we are giving than when we are receiving. So spend a few minutes (or pounds) on a friend every once in a while and you?ll quickly reap the emotional rewards.