Knowing how to make yourself happy comes down to knowing what causes you to feel the way you do. When you understand what makes you happy in the first place, you can use that knowledge to continue to feel happy. Instead of trying to find happiness as if it is something outside of you, you need to search for it within. Not only that, you need to be able to activate those feelings as well. There are lots of ways to feel happy so let me offer you some tips that might help.
One way to make yourself happy is to focus on things that make you happy. Most of the time, people are unhappy because they keep focusing on negative things. I don’t care how happy you are, if you go around constantly thinking about depressing things, sooner or later, you are going to start feeling pretty lousy. Your emotions, whether happiness or anything else, can be controlled by what you focus on and what meaning you give to things.
For example, will getting a meal to eat for dinner make you happy? That depends. If you are accustomed to having 3 meals a day, then you’ll probably just be neutral about it but if you haven’t eaten in a few days, that one meal can make you extremely happy. What if you make minimum wage and suddenly land a job that pays 3 times as much? Will that make you happy? What if you were already making 10 times more than the minimum wage but got demoted or had a pay cut and not you are making only 3 times the minimum wage? Will you be happy now?
As you can see, things don’t make you happy. It is your perception and the meaning that you give to those “things” that make you happy. This is why people in 3rd world countries can experience happiness while you have celebrities who have everything and end up committing suicide. When you make the mistake of thinking that happiness comes from external things, it will be hard to stay happy. Only you can make yourself happy. Now that you know this, here are some ways to make yourself happy.
How to Make Yourself Happy
1. Focus on what you already have and be grateful for it. Just think about a time in your life when you didn’t have the things you now have in your life. The friends, the relationships, the career, etc. When you focus on what is good in your life, it will make you feel happier.
2. Make making yourself happy easy. Too often we place all of these conditions on what has to happen before we can allow ourselves to be happy. “If I don’t have $100k in savings, then I can’t be happy.” “If I don’t achieve 10% body fat, then I can’t be happy.” When you place rules that make it hard for you to be happy, you may find yourself very unhappy.
One easy rule you can set up for yourself is, “If I am able to wake up in the morning, I will be happy.”
3. Be happy in the pursuit of your goals. Instead of trying to acquire things and achieve goals in order to be happy, why not be happy while you pursue your goals. In other words, don’t seek happiness, happily seek. Or to put it in another way, enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Experiencing this is a lot easier when you’re doing something you love.
Knowing how to make yourself happy comes down to realizing that you can allow yourself to be happy simply by letting go of all of the conditions that you have allowed society to place on yourself. The conditions that this and that has to happen before you can feel happy will only make being happy difficult. It’s great to go for goals and dreams and you should, but don’t place your happiness on whether or not you accomplish those goals. Learn to be happy in pursuit of those goals and dreams. After all, isn’t the purpose of life to be happy? If so, stop pursing it and just be.
