Before I talk about the 12 Activities you can use to increase your happiness and joy (from “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky) I first want to talk about another important aspect.
HOW these activities work.
There are 5 “Hows” behind the activities that it is important to understand before diving in to start them.
The first of these 5 “Hows” is Positive Emotions.
These activities work because they are designed to create a more constant stream of positive emotions in our lives.
To be specific, positive emotions are feelings of: joy, delight, contentment, serenity, curiosity, interest, vitality, enthusiasm, vigor, thrill, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. I am sure there are more, but this gives you a good sense of what I mean when I say “positive emotions”.
The main point here is this:
Experiencing a myriad of on-going smaller positive emotions does more to sustain ongoing happiness than significant events or great pieces of good fortune, which happen only rarely.
The problem most people face is this: we tend to focus on and remember the “big” things.
- Remember when we got our first house
- My first kiss, man that was nice.
- Just finished remodeling the kitchen – So amazing now!
Whatever it was, those bigger things are the ones we tend to anticipate, remember, and have stories about. Telling someone that the sunrise is beautiful every morning just doesn’t make as good a story as, “it was a cold day in January, and I was out shoveling snow as the sun rose and the whole sky turned into a pastel rainbow of colors, it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen!”
Now as much as remembering that great sunrise might bring about a pang of positive emotions, really, what we are looking for is the ability to create ON-GOING positive emotions through these 12 activities. We are looking on a much smaller scale, to have everyday events bring about joy and love and awe, so that we have a constant flow of positive emotions and are consistently happy.
I’m not saying those big memorable events are bad, they too bring about positive emotions, perhaps a great amount of positive emotion, but it is rarely sustainable over the long term and usually fades over time. And since these big things generally do not happen often, if we rely ONLY on them, we will find great dips in our happiness as we wait for the next on to come along.
So instead the focus of these 12 activities is on how to build a framework of consistent, even if small, positive emotions that we can experience regularly and increase our happiness that way.
Until the next time, keep laughing and enjoying all positive emotions, no matter how big.