Daily Habits For Happiness

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,: 2024

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The incessant chatter of our minds, filled with worries, doubts, and endless hypotheticals, can leave us feeling overwhelmed, restless, and discontented. It seems that no matter how hard we try, the pursuit of peace and contentment eludes us. But what if there was a way to break free from the grip of anxiety and overthinking? What if we could silence the cacophony of our minds and discover a path toward tranquility, happiness, and fulfillment? This book explores precisely that journey—the transformative voyage from a life dominated by anxiety to one of profound calmness and contentment. Through a blend of practical strategies, introspective exercises, and empowering perspectives, we pave the way toward embracing serenity and cultivating lasting happiness. The pages between this cover aim to guide you toward a newfound sense of peace.

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By providing practical tips and insight on how to manage anxiety and overthinking, you will uncover a path toward a more fulfilling and joyful life. We will also be looking at what happiness is, how it works physiologically, and how we can use current scientific understanding of well-being to start creating a life that we love. Happiness starts in the brain, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a question of neuroscience. We’ll be exploring the question of happiness over the course of forty practical, evidence-based techniques, covering daily happiness habits, joy-inducing environments, and short-term quick fixes for bad days. Finally, we’ll consider how we can pull everything together to create lasting lifestyle changes that genuinely make us feel good. Let’s dive in and discover the power of tackling our inner struggles and finding the happiness we all deserve. Have a Routine—But Not a Strict One!

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Having a routine is like having a roadmap to your day. It helps you prioritize tasks and plan out your time. But did you know that having a routine can also help ease anxiety? When everything feels uncertain and up in the air, having a sense of structure can be incredibly reassuring. It's like a warm hug from your schedule, telling you that everything will be okay. Picture the kind of person you imagine has their life together. They wake up at the same time every day, they have an orderly morning routine, and they have a fixed food, work, and exercise schedule that they move through predictably, every day.

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They’re probably quite productive ... but are they happy? It turns out that although routine can be beneficial, you don’t want to get stuck in a rut. Research psychologist Catherine Hartley and her colleagues conducted a study with 132 participants who were tracked for three or four months. Hartley wanted to see their general mental health state and overall mood, as well as examine what kind of daily routines they engaged in. What the data revealed was pretty interesting: People who were able to do something novel every day tended to report more positive, happy emotions than those who just stuck to the same old, same old. The novelty didn’t have to be big—it could be something as simple as going to a new place or trying something different for lunch. The team also tracked the participants via GPS and noticed that on days when people moved around more and visited more locations, they were more likely to use words like “happy,” “relaxed,” and “excited” to describe their mood that day.

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Hartley wanted to understand more, so she had some of the participants undergo an MRI scan. Here, she found that the people who were regularly exposing themselves to novel situations actually had different brain function than those who didn’t. Their scans showed an increase in brain activity between the hippocampus and the striatum—areas of the brain associated with experience processing and reward, respectively. The more diverse the experiences, the greater the connectivity between these two brain regions and the greater the reported feelings of well-being. The team published their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience, concluding that there was a definite relationship between our daily environments, our behaviors, our brain activity, and our overall mood. Diversity of experience, they found, was positively correlated with improved well-being. "Our results suggest that people feel happier when they have more variety in their daily routines—when they go to novel places and have a wider array of experiences," Hartley claimed, and since the research concluded just before worldwide Covid-19 lockdowns, many were interested in using the findings to maintain well-being despite being shut in at home.

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If “experiential diversity” means greater well-being, then it’s obvious that if we want to be happier, we need a little novelty. What does that look like day to day? Well, it’s likely that each of us has different thresholds for what counts as “novel”—for some, new experiences can feel stressful or threatening, while others are major thrill-seekers and adrenaline junkies. What Hartley’s research suggests, however, is that just a little daily variation is enough to wake up certain areas of the brain. You don’t have to go on a grand adventure every day—just try something new here and there: •Take a different route to work or, if you have a few minutes, explore that strange back street that you always walk past but never go down. •Instead of getting your favorite dish at the restaurant you always go to, get something completely different or try another place entirely. •Mix up the order of things you were already going to do that day; for example, change plans at the last minute and run some errands in town instead for a change of pace.

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•Take a walk somewhere you haven’t been before and really absorb everything new and unexpected around you. •Rummage in your closet and wear something you’ve forgotten about or a novel combination of items you haven’t tried before. •Work in a different room, in a different chair, or even in the same room but oriented differently. The reason novelty makes us happy is that, neurophysiologically, the sensation of novelty is closely connected to the sensation of reward. And in many ways, the experience of depression is not dissimilar from the feeling of being “stuck in a rut” and under-stimulated. Trying something new is a way to kick yourself out of that rut. Think of novelty as giving your brain a little surprise, which produces a tiny dopamine kick and engages you with your environment.

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If you’re feeling a little low, pause and ask if you’re really just bored—have you been doing too much of that same thing? Time to try something new! Say Thank You Gratitude is like a little magic potion that can help ease the gnawing knot of anxiety in your stomach. There's something about focusing on the things you're thankful for that just automatically boosts your mood and improves your outlook on everything. When you take a moment to feel genuinely grateful for something—whether it's a sense of safety, having a roof over your head, or even just the perfect cup of coffee in the morning—it helps shift your focus away from all the things that worry you. And when you're not constantly consumed by fear and anxiety, you're freer to feel calm, relaxed, and happy. It's like a two-for-one special—you get to feel good about the things you have and also enjoy a little mental vacation from all the stressful thoughts swirling around in your head.

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ooked like in the brain. In a: 2015

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He broke them into two groups—one group was asked to write out “gratitude letters,” while the other group simply continued with their therapy. After three months, Kini put all the subjects through an MRI scan while they did a separate gratitude task called the “Pay It Forward” task. The subjects were told that a generous sponsor had given them some money, before being asked if they wanted to donate a portion of this money in turn as a way of saying thank you. It was explained that they should donate money in proportion to how grateful they felt for the money they had received. So, if they felt extremely grateful for the gift, they were told to donate generously. The researchers did this so they could assign exact numbers to the measurement of gratitude, which is understandably a little hard to quantify. The results were interesting.

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Kini discovered that there were significant differences in brain activity in the participants who agreed to donate some of their money versus those who decided not to do so. But there was more: “Subjects who participated in gratitude letter writing showed both behavioral increases in gratitude and significantly greater neural modulation in the medial prefrontal cortex three months later." Basically, they found that, when people had previously strengthened feelings of gratitude by writing gratitude letters, they tended to experience the effects of the Pay It Forward exercise weeks and even months after. We can conclude two things from this research: 1. Gratitude literally shapes our brain, and 2. the more we practice gratitude, the more grateful we become. And though it wasn’t the focus of this research, we can also see that the more grateful we feel, the more generous we tend to want to be. This makes sense—if you feel blessed and like you have more than you need, you are more likely to feel that you’re in the position to share. Though many other studies have shown that gratitude can make you healthier, more resilient, and happier, and it can even help you have better willpower, Kini et al. showed that gratitude actually leads to concrete, physical changes in the brain.

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Injecting a little gratitude, like novelty, doesn’t have to be a major project to be effective. Occasionally write a letter to someone who has done something to benefit your life, or keep a gratitude journal noting everything you’re fortunate to have. Why not wake up every morning and simply say “thank you” that you’re alive today? Meditation Can Make You Happy Have you ever had one of those days where everything just seems to go wrong? The kind of day where you spill coffee on your shirt, get stuck in traffic, and forget an important meeting? Let's face it, life can be stressful. That's why more and more people are turning to meditation to find a sense of calm and happiness.

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elings of well-being (Thorpe,: 2023

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nother’s pain (Lutz et al.,: 2008

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This has some intriguing implications for practitioners who claim that meditation allows them literally to influence and change their bodies. The Enigula and the temporoparietal junction are other areas in the brain that showed greater activity in the meditators—these regions are associated with emotions, empathy, and the ability to perspective shift. It appeared that brain activity associated with joy and serenity were more pronounced in those who meditated. The researchers even discovered elevated levels of gene-regulating machinery and lower expression of pro-inflammatory genes after eight hours of meditation. Practically speaking, this implies faster recovery and better stress resilience. The researchers concluded that the practice of meditation enabled “epigenetic alterations of the genome." Jill Sakai claimed in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology that “gene expression changes with meditation."

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In other words, though meditation cannot change your genes, it can influence the way those genes are expressed. Importantly, the kind of meditation under study was one focused on compassion and emerged from the Buddhist conception of loving kindness for all beings. But it is also possible to meditate with “pure compassion” that is not directed to anyone in particular, and this has also been associated with greater well-being and improved health. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center found that the areas of the brain associated with happiness were more active in meditators, and the areas associated with fear—i.e., parts of the amygdala—appeared to be better modulated. So, overall, the evidence strongly suggests that meditating Buddhists really are happier than others, not to mention less disturbed by negative stimuli. How can we meditate to improve our happiness? Meditation master Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche warns against the kind of trendy Western meditation that is really mindfulness “with a focus,” i.e., pushing some experiences and thoughts out of awareness in order to focus on one chosen thought or object.

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Instead of this busy, grasping form of meditation, he suggests not doing anything in particular with your body, breath, or mind. Don’t “focus” on anything. Sit erect but relaxed, cross-legged but without strain. Keep your eyes open and your gaze soft and possibly lowered, not forcing it on anything. Next, your breathing: Each time your breath goes out, “go out with it." Whatever you’re feeling in that moment as your breath leaves you, let your mind dissolve with it. Don’t count breaths or follow the inhale or force yourself to do any kind of special “spiritual” breathing.

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Just be natural and let go of any struggle. See if you can identify completely with this breath rather than imagining it is separate from you. After the breath out dissolves, there is a gap, and you are surrounded by space. Just hang there and linger for a moment. The inhale will happen by itself. When you’ve done this for a while, try to pair the body and the breath. Practitioners are advised to have a “strong back; soft front."

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Good posture represents your innate dignity and strength, and dissolving with the breath represents vulnerability, softness, and compassion. Your mind will get in the way, but remember that you are not trying to stop thought—it’s a battle you’ll always lose! Thoughts are not the problem but rather our attachment to them. Instead of getting fixated on our own thought traffic, we can just be aware and see thoughts as thoughts. We just notice when our minds have wandered, but without irritation (which is just one more thought). Simply sit. Body, breath, and mind.

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Be this way for a few minutes, then get up to stretch your legs. Self-Talking Yourself to Happiness Meditation is something we can practice and deepen over the course of years—or a whole lifetime—and it’s also something we can dip into literally any moment of any day. So much of our unhappiness manifests and expresses itself as thoughts. Our constant flow of mental chatter can be, when we start to look at it, surprisingly negative and repetitive. During meditation, you may be surprised to find just how relentless your inner self-talk really is. But could you change the program, so to speak? Most of us have heard of the technique of self-affirmation.

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Have you ever stopped to give yourself a compliment? It may sound silly, but taking the time to acknowledge your strengths and accomplishments can actually work wonders for your overall well-being. Self-affirmation is a simple practice that involves focusing on your positive qualities and achievements. It is when you use self-talk to affirm your own worth, to support yourself, to show yourself kindness, and to boost your appreciation of your own value as a human being. Basically, it’s speaking nicely to yourself! By reminding ourselves of our worth, we can lower feelings of anxiety about the future and foster a sense of calm and happiness. It's a small gesture that can make a big impact on our mental health, and who doesn't deserve a little boost of self-love every once in a while?

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s associates was published in: 2015

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They were asked to dwell on these positive thoughts, visualizing themselves having related experiences, or thinking about the details of this area. The other half were not told to focus in this way. The findings suggested that self-affirmation boosted activity in the ventral striatum and ventral medial cortex, which are areas of the brain connected with the experience of reward. What’s more, the research also showed that when affirmations were future-based, they tended to have a more powerfully positive effect on the brain. An example of a future-based affirmation is: “I’m going to do well with my business next year." We’ll explore the way that thinking about the future can impact our happiness in the present in a later chapter in this book, but for now, it’s interesting simply to note that words of affirmation are not mere words—they have real consequences on our neural connections and brain activity. Self-affirmations are not just fluff.

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The researchers claim that they act as a sort of psychological immune system or a modulator, buffering us against setbacks or disappointments by reminding us of the resources we have and the positive traits we still possess. But the world of affirmations is more complex than it looks. It matters how we engage in affirmative self-talk. If we tell ourselves “I’m perfect just the way I am” but we don’t really believe it, we could actually end up creating more psychological distress for ourselves. Instead, we need to pay close attention to the kind of affirmation we’re giving ourselves. If we want to boost our feelings of self-worth and bolster our self-esteem, it may work better to draw attention to the things we value—for example, our work, hobbies, or relationships. We need to remind ourselves consistently that our self-worth has a broad foundation, and by using affirmations, we can draw our focus to those things in life that we value and that give us purpose and meaning.

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But the researchers also discovered that these affirmations are turbo-charged when they are focused on the future. The theory is that if we can imagine a promising outcome, we can begin to create a version of ourselves that is better able to tackle any challenges that may come our way. Or, to put it as Cascio did, “We find novel evidence that a future frame may act synergistically with value-based self-affirmations to bolster a sense of self prior to threatexposure." How can we use these findings to improve our own self-talk? Importantly, it’s about more than simply flattering yourself or saying nice things. To be value-based, affirmations of this kind need to remind you of the principles and beliefs you hold dear. The idea is that you can tap into your own integrity and identity, and this makes you feel your own worth and value more deeply.

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Which makes you happier! Here are some examples of values-based self-affirmations: •I trust myself to get through any challenge that may come my way. •No matter what happens, I can always choose kindness and compassion. •I always speak up for the things I believe in. •I’m a good artist who will continue to create the kind of things that matter to me. •My family will always be there for me. •I’m strong; I know how to use my talents to make money.

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Of course, yours might not look anything like this—values are always going to be unique and personal to the people who have them. But notice how each of the above are rooted not in a place of personal attributes or esteem, but rather in what we value as people. Notice also that many of them are oriented toward the future. Creativity, family, spirituality, money ... what do you value? And how does that value look if you project it into the future? In the past, self-help advocates suggested affirmations that focused on fixed, individual characteristics (“I am beautiful, I am successful, I am intelligent”), but it’s easy to see why these can have mixed results. When you dig into your values, however, you are encouraging your brain to inoculate itself against future adversity, not to mention help you feel better in the moment.

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To practice your own affirmations, simply make sure that each one speaks to your deeper principles and core beliefs, and then add a future element for extra potency. You can write these affirmations down and read through them throughout the day or say them every morning—in the same way as you would take a daily multivitamin! The Reading Habit It’s hard to find any commendable person who doesn’t claim that reading played a big part in their success. We all know that reading is an excellent way to learn, to broaden your horizons, to cultivate discipline, to spur your creativity, and even to connect empathically with others. Reading is great! But there also happens to be sound scientific evidence for reading as a habit that boosts your mental well-being, too. When you read, magic can happen.

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t seems, for stories. Another: 2009

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Cognitive neuropsychologist Dr. Lewis, who led the study, claims that “losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation. This is particularly poignant in uncertain economic times when we are all craving a certain amount of escapism. It really doesn’t matter what book you read, by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author’s imagination." That’s not all, though. In trying to understand the characters and the plot unfolding in the pages, our brains work hard to empathize and take on new perspectives, which in itself is a powerful way to boost happiness levels. Reading is like empathy and compassion gym! Reading literary fiction (i.e., stories that delve into the inner worlds of the characters) boosts our “theory of mind” ability, which is our capacity for imagining the mental worlds of others.

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r real-world relationships. A: 2014

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Reading gives you the opportunity to escape from the chaos of daily life and immerse yourself in a world of imagination and creativity. Plus, you'll likely learn something new along the way, whether it's about a different culture or a new way of thinking. Because reading has such far-reaching benefits for health, cognitive abilities, and verbal/communication skills, it works in every area of life to make us more alert, responsive, empathetic, and overall more engaged with the world around us. What should we be reading? Well, anything we like! Try to get a little reading done every day, and build up to it if you’re not quite used to it. Choose something you’re genuinely excited to read about, but don’t be afraid to mix it up and experiment with themes and authors you might not have considered before (remember the power of novelty?).

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is better (Lauren M. Singer,: 2016

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Dear Happiness... Matthew Lieberman is a psychologist at UCLA, and his research has suggested that putting your difficult thoughts and feelings down in black and white can actually help you overcome them. He conducted a simple experiment where he asked volunteers to have brain scans and then afterward write in a journal or diary for twenty minutes a day for four days. Half of the participants were asked to write about neutral experiences—just whatever they thought of. The other half were asked to write down their more emotional experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Then he scanned their brains again. Can you guess what he found?

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Compared to those who wrote neutrally, the people who wrote down their emotions demonstrated greater brain activity in the area of the brain called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain is concerned with emotional regulation, so the conclusion is that by writing feelings down, these participants were actually working to modulate and manage those experiences. Likewise, as the researchers investigating the meditators’ brains found, there was also lowered activity in the amygdala, suggesting that journaling helped people manage the intensity of their negative emotions. Overall, this technique seemed to help people process emotions and downregulate stress and unhappiness. "Writing seems to help the brain regulate emotion unintentionally. Whether it's writing things down in a diary, writing bad poetry, or making up song lyrics that should never be played on the radio, it seems to help people emotionally," Dr Lieberman said. Interestingly, Lieberman found that men seemed to benefit even more from this activity than women, perhaps because, for men, the act of expressing emotions abstractly is more of a novelty than it is for women.

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In any case, everyone can benefit from keeping a diary, and they don’t necessarily have to discover great insights or come to any solutions or conclusions. Rather, the act of writing seems to help us externalize and make abstract our experience, which helps us manage and regulate it better. If the idea of keeping a journal seems a little corny, don’t worry, you can achieve the same benefits in other ways. The idea is simply to express and externalize your emotions in an abstract way, and you can do that with visual art, colors, music (maybe a playlist?), collages, doodling, short story writing, or even a messy combination of all of these. Just remember to keep your diary private, especially if you’re writing down very personal thoughts, and bear in mind that you are not trying to create a masterpiece to show off. Your diary doesn’t have to make sense or be beautiful; it just needs to be a place where you can slow down, process, and put what’s in your head down onto the page. Try to journal every day if you can.

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You can purchase readymade journals or make your own. You can go for a line a day or fill up reams and reams of paper with “automatic” style writing. A great habit is to keep your journal next to your bed and scribble down your feelings before sleep—get your worries out of your head and down onto paper so they won’t disturb your sleep! Keep the Flame of Hope Burning Have you ever noticed that when you have even just a tiny glimmer of hope, you feel a little bit better? Life can be tough sometimes. And in moments when stress feels like it's about to consume us, hope can be the light that leads us out of the tunnel. Keeping the flame of hope burning can work wonders on our mental and emotional health.

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It's like having a positive outlook that boosts our energy levels and puts us in a better mood. But what many don't know is that hope also helps to curb anxiety. When we hold on to hope, we create a sense of optimism that outweighs the fear and worries that trigger anxiety. And, as a bonus, that hopefulness increases our overall sense of happiness. Therefore, hope really can be thought of as a consistent daily happiness habit. And it’s something that absolutely affects our day-to-day well-being. Have you ever heard of elderly couples where once one passes away, the other does, too, not long after?

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l a force hope can be. In the: 1950

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Interestingly, most of the domesticated rats ended up paddling for days before succumbing to death. The wild rats (i.e., those who are renowned for their swimming ability) died within minutes of being in the water. The tame rats stayed alive for ages, but the fierce, wild, and independent ones died swiftly. Richter’s theory was that the wild rats could not fall back on either fight or flight and could not help themselves. So, they gave up hope. To test this, he took more wild rats, and shortly after he put them in the water, he pulled them out again for a little while before putting them back in. The result was that these rats learned that the situation was not, in fact, hopeless and—you guessed it—they continued to swim and fight for their lives.

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What we can learn from this experiment (other than the fact that some people are shockingly cruel to rats) is that when someone perceives a situation as doomed, they give up, but when they have a reason to keep going, they can and they do—often for a very long time. Richter simply discovered that “after elimination of hopelessness, the rats do not die." Returning to the question of elderly couples, we can easily see that when one person no longer has “a reason to keep swimming,” they could give up to such an extent that they, too, die. This admittedly morbid topic shows us that hope can have measurable effects, not just on our abstract feeling of well-being, but on our actual will to survive. The rats in the experiment were, for all intents, similar, physically speaking. But their will to live was almost completely determined by their own perception of whether they were doomed or not. The conclusion for those of us who want to be happy is clear: Keep the flame of hope burning.

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Have something to look forward to in life. No matter what, do not allow yourself to think you’re doomed. Remind yourself instead that even if things are hard, they can get better. If you are optimistically expecting a good outcome, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because that hope allows you to tap into reserves of your own energy and willpower to make that good outcome happen. Summary: •Happiness can be tricky to define, but it all starts in the brain. We can turn to scientific peer-reviewed studies to learn the daily habits and mindsets most associated with well-being. •Though routines are important, so is novelty; make efforts to mix things up now and again and try something new every day.

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•Gratitude is strongly associated with feelings of well-being. Say thank you, or simply dwell on all the things you have to be thankful for. •Try meditation, but remember to approach it without grasping at goals or desired outcomes. •Try self-affirmation, but focus on affirmations that are value-based rather than those dealing with your traits or performance as a person. •Get into a reading habit to increase your empathy and communication skills as well as relaxation. Anything goes, but literary fiction is best for strengthening perspective and “theory of mind” ability. •Journaling or keeping a diary can make you happier and help you modulate and regulate your emotions.

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Try whatever form works best for you. •Finally, understand the role that hope plays in keeping people optimistic and resilient. Always have something to look forward to and you will discover you have endless sources of energy and enthusiasm to draw on. Don’t give up! Thanks for joining us on this calming journey. Remember small changes can lead to big shifts in your happiness. For further guidance and support, check out Nick Trenton's book, The Anxiety Cure, or head to bit.ly slash Nick Trenton for resources and inspiration.

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Until next time, stay present, embrace peace, and walk the path to calm. You can find more resources and connect with Nick Trenton at bit.ly slash Nick Trenton.