PPI #91: How to Be Happy - Secrets to Happiness

Have you ever wondered why certain people seem to be so full of happiness, so full of vibrancy? Well, there's some secrets to happiness that we can all learn.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker, and I'm on a mission to help people reach their full potential in life. And a big part of that is making sure that we're as happy as possible. And I'm really excited today to take you through some secrets and to how you can generate more happiness in your life. So make sure you stick around for all of these so that you can really up your happiness game. Now, this is a big deal for me, this whole science to happiness, the whole idea of how to be happier, the secrets to happiness. Because, frankly, when I was growing up and for the most part of my adult life, I didn't think of happiness as something that I was in the driver's seat on. I sort of thought of it as, you know, it's kind of external to me. And some days things happen and I'm happy. And some days things don't happen, I'm not happy. And then my mind blew up when I realized that actually I was in the driver's seat on happiness, that there's some secrets to generating happiness. And if you learn these secrets, you can genuinely live a much happier life. And today we're going to be going through all of those in a quest to help you reach your full potential and live a happier life. And there's one other reason why you should really take this in. There's a book called the Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Highly recommend that you read it if you haven't. And do you know what the number one regret is of people who are soon to pass? It's that they wish they would have allowed themselves to have been happier. Okay, so here we go. Five things that you can be doing to help generate more happiness in your life, all backed by science. Number one thing that you can do, I do this on a daily basis, is start your day engineered for happiness. And I do this with a simple phrase. I start my day saying, today is going to be a great day. It immediately puts a smile on my face, puts me in a positive mood. Now, this is something that I just do automatically because I've been doing it for so many years. But to get started doing this, I simply hung up a piece of paper on the wall next to my bed, where I got out of the bed every morning. It was the first thing I saw. You could put this on the mirror in your bathroom. So start your day with Some happiness with a simple phrase. Today is going to be a great day. It will put a smile on your face. You will feel the benefits very quickly. Number two, the next thing that you can do to generate a lot more happiness, a good happiness secret is to schedule guilt free leisure or hobby time in your week, time for yourself time, doing things that you know will make you happy. I find a fantastic day of the week to be doing this on is a Sunday. Or you could do it on a Friday afternoon, but, but definitely before Monday morning, before the week gets going. And just take some time to schedule into your week things that you know will generate happiness for you, things that you know will allow you to enjoy yourself. That could be making sure that you have enough time to go to the gym. It could be booking yourself a massage or you know, maybe going to see some friends or some time to read a book or engage in a hobby. But make sure you're scheduling that guilt free kind of free time in your week and that you'll generate a lot more happiness in your days.

In your day. Yeah. Is that okay?

Number three secret to generate more happiness is to think about your energy generators versus energy drainers. What do I mean by that? Well, what are the people, places and activities in your life that give you energy versus drain you of energy? Because we all have the people, places and activities in our life that fill us with joy. And equally people, places, activities in life that drain us of joy or give us energy and drain us of energy and make that list, draw that list out and then ask yourself, what can I do to spend more time with the people, more time at the places, more time doing the activities that give me energy, that fill me with joy rather than the ones that subtract it. You know, make a conscious decision. How can you change that up? Put more of you on the energy generation list and less of you on the energy draining list. Number four thing that you can be doing to generate more happiness in your life is to look after your health. Without our health, we're nothing. And if we actually invest in our health, it generates more happiness in our lives. There's three absolutely critical things that we need to be doing to help generate more happiness. One is our sleep. Science shows if you're not getting an eight hour night of sleep, you are less likely to be at your happiest state than if you had gotten eight hours of sleep. So protect that sleep. Number two, nutrition. If you're eating sugary snacks or, you know, processed foods, they have been shown to create a depressive Or a spike, and then a complete, you know, plummet state of mood within you that isn't conducive to you being your happiest self. So what you eat has a direct impact on your mood. So are you eating the foods that you know you should be eating that the best version of you would be eating, or are you eating a lot of junk? And if you're eating a lot of junk, it's going to have a serious impact on your happiness over time. The last thing that you can be doing with regard to your health that will definitely spike your happiness is exercise. In fact, science has shown that people who exercise in the morning benefit from a 12 hour mood boost for the rest of their day. What's not to like about that? So, so put some exercise at the start of your day to generate more happiness for the hours that follow. And number five, and this is perhaps the most important of all, to generate more happiness in your life. Choose to be happy. And I know that might sound simplistic, but it really is a choice. At the end of the day, no matter what happens to you, you can still choose to be upset, happy. Somebody hits your car, okay, the car's been damaged, but what do you want to do? Do you want to choose to be super upset, irate, and ruin the rest of your day and perhaps a day of people around you, or are you going to choose to be happy? You miss your train, you miss a plane, okay, yeah, that sucks. But you have a choice. Are you going to spend the rest of your day upset about that, or are you going to choose to be happy? Happiness really is a choice at the end of the day. And you have a choice, no matter what moment to moment to moment throughout your day, to choose your response. And you can choose a happy response or you can choose a dreadful response. So make it a conscious choice to choose happiness. So I hope you've enjoyed that. And if you head over to my website@ericpartaker.com you'll also be able to subscribe to my weekly Insights newsletter.