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Happiness Hints For The Holidays

Defeating The Dismal Drearies During The Holidays – Holiday Happiness Habits from HappinessHabit.com

Reject Self Pity – Feeling sorry for yourself is a sure route to sadness. If you catch yourself in self pity, STOP! Redirect your attention to positive, rewarding thoughts and activities.

Negative Judgments Cause Pain – To enjoy happy holidays, stop judging. Measuring life by other people’s should’s and ought’s is always discouraging and self defeating.

Design and Create a Fun, Rewarding Holiday that fits your circumstances. Decide to have a great holiday and then make it happen.

Doing Good Helps Us To Feel Good! Spend time helping people who genuinely need and appreciate your assistance.

Avoid Rich Foods and Excess Alcohol – That lift your spirits for a few moments and then leave you feeling bloated, guilty and unhappy for hours.

Exercise Aggressively – It’s a great way to work off stress, stay in shape, feel great and see other people.

Share The Holiday Spirit – Smile, speak and greet strangers warmly. Extend a genuinely warm, holiday welcome to everyone you meet.

When we summon up a sense of joy and honestly project it, we can’t help but raise our own spirits as well. Remember the people who need our warmth the most are often those who are least able to return it.

Full Happiness Habits for the Holidays article on American Chronicle
Other Happiness Articles on American Chronicle. The Happiness Habits pages at HappinessHabit.com share more insights about how to live a happy life all year round. Make Happiness Your Holiday Habit!

Tags:happiness habit, holiday happiness, holiday sadness, michele moore
Posted in Happiness Notes, Holiday | 1 Comment »

Live According To Your Aspirations Not Your Inclinations

Live According To Your Aspirations Not Your Inclinations

There is always tension between what our past history and old habits incline us to do and how the person we aspire to be acts. That’s why it is so important to Live According To Your Aspirations Not Your Inclinations.

Our Aspirations include everything we want to achieve in life, the happy, spiritually successful person we Aspire to be, the happy life we want to live, what we want to give to others. People who don’t have Aspirations or desires to develop themselves and achieve something of value tend to stay stuck as they are.

Focusing on what we want to achieve and the happy, spiritually successful person we want to be allows us to change and direct our lives in new, more successful ways.

Once we See It in our mind’s eye, Desire It and make it an objective, Believe It and build our confidence, then we can Achieve It. Dwelling on what is wrong and what we don’t want wastes time and is very counterproductive.

The key to building happiness is to continually focus on what you want to achieve until it becomes habit. Practice happiness skills until they become your own new powerful happiness habits. Practice being your best self all of the time and Live According To Your Aspirations, Not Your Inclinations.

Tags:happiness aspirations, happiness habit, happy, michele moore
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Happiness Habit Hints For The Holidays

Happiness Habit Hints For The Holidays

Do Habitually Happy People ever get lonesome, frustrated, disappointed or down like the rest of us over the holidays? The answer is yes, absolutely! But they bounce back quickly. Here are some of their Happiness Habit hints for the holidays:

Be Adventuresome And Creative – Habitually Happy People know there are usually lots of great ways to do anything, including the holidays, well. Different is often very delightful. Holding on to rigid expectations and thinking there is just one right way to do things is a major source of holiday pain. Instead, resolve to be creative and invite others along on an exciting new holiday adventure.

Flexibility Is An Important Key To Happiness – Be willing to reposition your perspectives, change your plans and even your preferences to cast off difficulties so you can honestly embrace good will. Resolve that no matter what happens, you are going to have a great time and help others do so too.

Self Pity Is A Sure Route To Sadness – Feeling sorry for yourself is always self defeating. Don’t do it! The Poor Me’s manufacture self made misery. Focus on anything and everything else but yourself. Spend time helping someone who genuinely needs your assistance. Take care of yourself and remember that excessive self concern is a major source of unhappiness.

Sometimes Strangers Offer Safety – Families and even fond friendships can turn toxic over the holidays. Involving new people changes group dynamics. So does changing the place, the time, the theme, the menu. Altering anything can help break bad ruts. Misery means we’re meant to change.

Drive Your Holidays With Delight – Resolve to have a good time all the time. Don’t let any one or any thing shake you your determination to savor and enjoy each moment as much as you can. Don’t hand control of your holiday happiness over to anything that threatens to drag down your spirits.

Negative Judgments Cause Pain – In fact, most of our emotional pain is caused by our negative judgments. To enjoy happy holidays, stop judging. Measuring life by should’s and ought’s brings sadness. Envision the holiday you want to create and let judgment keep you on track to achieve that goal.

Give Without Strings Attached – Decide what you want to do because YOU want to do it out of genuine goodness. Let goodness be your guiding goal and your sole reward. Don’t give with strings attached in order to get. If the returns don’t come back, you will be disappointed.

Assess Reality Accurately And Don’t Get Carried Away – It’s easy to swept up with exuberant holiday joy. Over extending yourself, incurring big bills, losing sleep, forgoing wise diet and drink choices is not the path to peace or happiness. Excess in anything invariably brings pain, not joy.

Guard Your Personal Time Carefully – Holidays are times of giving, but preserve some precious personal time for yourself. Normal schedules are often discarded, it’s easy to be on the run all the time. Stop to enjoy time with yourself. Habitually Happy People seem gregarious, but they often say they need plenty of time for themselves. Preserving personal time is often the best investment you can make for holiday happiness.

Share The Spirit – Smile, greet and speak to strangers. Extend a warm, holiday welcome to everyone you meet. When we summon up a sense of joy and honestly project it, we can’t help but raise our own spirits, and we might just brighten someone else’s holiday as well.

Share your favorite holiday Happiness Hints – Post them in a comment below.

Happy Holidays To You All!

Michele Moore & The Happiness Habit Team

Happiness Habit: Skills & Strategies of Habitually Happy People
Copyright 1999 – , Michele Moore. All Rights Reserved. Reprints.

Tags:happiness habit, happiness hint, happiness holidays, holiday hints, michele moore
Posted in Happiness Notes, Holiday | 7 Comments »

Lie, Cheat or Steal?

“You Can’t Lie, Cheat or Steal Your Way To Happiness!”

Habitually Happy people are high achievers, they believe in trying to be their best and doing their best all of the time. They are goal oriented, but there are lines they definitely will not cross.

“When I do my best I can let go of the results knowing I can do no more,” one said.

“You cannot lie, cheat or steal your way to happiness,” another commented. “You can lie, cheat and steal your way to riches, power and position. We all know people who do, but none of them seem to be truly happy.”

That’s true, they know they are not doing their best and they are not proud of their actions. They also don’t want to be found out. They often feel empty or like fakes or frauds.

For some people money is all important. The more they value it, the less happy they seem to be. And there are lots of people who have money but no happiness.

For others power is the primal drive. Power and control over others distorts relationships and keeps the honesty and love that propels true happiness from ever flowering.

Think of people with lots of money and power who have lost touch with reality precisely because of these things. A certain fading, moon walking rock star comes immediately to mind.

“I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.” Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States (1743-1826)

Jefferson was a man with money and power who realized the emptiness of both.

Can you be happy with lots of money, power and fame? Absolutely! But not if you make them your major concern.

The people who are happiest have made happiness their primary aim and goodness their guiding goal.

Tags:cheat happiness, happiness habit, happy people, michele moore, steal happiness
Posted in Happiness Notes | 2 Comments »

Bouncing Back To Happiness

Bouncing Back To Happiness

Bad things happen, inequities occur… often completely outside of our control. But even if we did help bring it on ourselves, the steps for Bouncing Back to happiness are still the same.

We don’t Bounce Back to feeling better by blaming, beating ourselves up or by focusing on the problem! Beating ourselves up just reinforces mistakes we are trying to avoid.

We Bounce Back by embracing our goals, our Best Selves and by focusing on what we want to achieve.

We build our skills and our well-being by identifying, implementing and celebrating successful solutions. We improve by rehearsing and reinforcing what’s right, not by Wallowing in Wrongs.

Habitually Happy people move from problems to solutions quickly. They are achievers who feel angst and anger over errors acutely, but they channel those emotions toward rectifying errors and finding superior resolutions. They don’t drain their drive to achieve or waste time tearing themselves down.

See errors and inequities as invitations for growth, change and leadership. Every error we make can strengthen us, making us stronger and wiser.

Sometimes our strength is needed to resolve inequities for others. When this happens, answer the call. Happiness comes from action and activity, from achievement and accomplishment.

Happiness Habit: Skills & Strategies of Habitually Happy People
Copyright 1999 – Michele Moore. All Rights Reserved. Reprints.

Tags:happiness habit, happiness recovery, michele moore, rebound happiness
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Happiness and God

Happiness and God

Is God central and necessary to happiness? The answer is both Absolutely and Not Necessarily…

Some of the happiest people in the world are Buddhists whose religious teachings do not recognize an all powerful God like the Judaeo-Christian and Muslim traditions. Buddhist spiritual teachings do strongly emphasize the actions and attitudes that lead to a happy, rewarding, joy-filled life.

In fact ALL major religions are founded on the same fundamentals that are central to happiness… Caring, compassion, creating a loving community, altruism, goodness, sharing, tolerance and release from anger and greed. Problems arise when religious righteousness becomes a bludgeon rather than a blessing.

Happiness and Love are Healing.

Living and worshiping within a happy, affirming spiritual community helps build and strengthen the skills and love that propels happiness. Helps, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Some of the habitually happy people we interviewed said they were atheists or agnostics.

The Happiness Habit is all inclusive, embracing and accepting all major religious traditions, yet resting on and requiring none.

Existing religious and spiritual communities already do a superior job sharing their theology, we leave that work to them. We focus on strictly skills and strategies that lead to a happy, fulfilling, successful life and leave religious teaching to others.

Happiness Habit: Skills & Strategies of Habitually Happy People
Copyright 1999 – Michele Moore. All Rights Reserved. Reprints.

Tags:happiest people, happiness god, happiness habit, michele moore
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Happiness And Care At Work

Happiness And Work

Happiness comes from a job well done, from knowing we’ve accomplished something of value in a positive and joyous way. Even repetitive, mundane tasks can be made beautiful by the spirit in which we address them. Joy in all we do is something we can choose to cultivate.

The best way to do anything well is to cultivate a love for it.

It makes no sense to place our attitudes in conflict with actions we must take to achieve our goals. That’s a sign we need to change what we’re doing, change how we feel about it, or both.

Excellence is a function of the attention, care and concern we give to what we do. Mediocre results from mediocre efforts bring little joy or satisfaction. We can choose to excel and do well through the attention, care and concern we extend to our work.

Happiness can come from doing an ordinary job extraordinarily well and taking pride in our achievements. Happiness comes from achieving something we value and celebrating our success.

Happiness comes from the joyous spirit of attention, care and concern we can choose to address our work.

Tags:happiness, happiness habit, happy work, michele moore, work happiness
Posted in Happiness Notes | 2 Comments »

Rapid Rebound & Resiliency

Rapid Rebound – The Resilience Response

Want to speed your rebound from life’s disappointments and difficulties? Imagine how you will think, act and feel when you have put the difficulty behind you. Envision what it will be like once you have rebounded from the problem and try to adopt that mental perspective.

Once we have put a problem behind us, the difficulty:

– Absorbs less time and attention.

– Causes us less emotional pain.

– Our view of the problem changes.

As we reposition our perspective on the problem, our perception of the problem changes. The key is to want to adopt a less painful perspective. Think about how you’ll feel when you are “over” the problem and consciously try to acquire that state.

Resiliency is important to Happiness. Imagining a rebound mind set helps us to acquire a new view of our alternatives and opportunities.

Tags:happiness habit, michele moore, rebound, resiliency
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“ESE” Your Way To Happiness

ESE Your Way To Happiness

Eat, Sleep and Exercise to feel happy, healthy and energized.

Eat Foods that help make you feel happy, alert and healthy. Some meals make us feel especially good for several hours, eat those foods! Body systems differ, food that gives some people a burst of energy makes others tired and sluggish. Eat what’s good for you. Avoid foods that taste good for a few minutes and leave you feeling guilty or low and slow for a long time.

Sleep is refreshment. Peak performance requires adequate rest. A small, additional investment of time in sleep can enhance efficiency and productivity for the entire day. Your best investment of time often lies in adequate rest.

Exercise – Activity increases blood flow to the brain, raises our adrenalin levels and sharpens our mental acuity. Exercising daily keeps the mind and body alert. Invest twenty minutes daily in a brisk walk for your body and private time for your mind. It’s time you spend building you happiness, health and emotional well-being.

You can’t think, act and feel your best or be at your best when you are tired, hungry, mis-fed or sluggish.

Tags:happiness exercise, happiness habit, happy, healthy happiness, michele moore
Posted in Happiness Notes | 3 Comments »

Be Your Best Self

Practice Being Your Best Self

We all experience those magical days when we are thinking, acting and feeling our very best. Our minds are alert, sharp, focused, we are able to concentrate well. An easy, relaxed powerful energy flows through our bodies. Our spirits seem to soar with joy.

Remember those days, recall those thoughts and feelings. Feel the rhythm and beat of that marvelous, positive energy flowing through your body. Connect with those and feelings and take them on for yourself. Project them and they will be yours.

You can’t step into that magic zone by concentrating on how badly you feel!

For more happiness habits and insights explore HappinessHabit.com

Tags:best self, happiness, happiness habit, happy, michele moore
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