What do you want in life? Chances are, whatever you wish to have can be summed up in one word: Happiness. Living a full, happy life is certainly reachable for all of us, but more often than not, the journey takes time and effort. The question is, what’s a good way of achieving happiness by ourselves? Well, learning self-happiness skills is one of those ways.
But before we get to what self-happiness skills are, let’s answer a question that we all ask ourselves at one point or another in our lives:
Will Happiness Find Me?
Short answer? Well, it’s the other way around. “You” are the one who will find happiness, and that’s why we call it “self-happiness.” After all, it’s better to find our own self-happiness, rather than just waiting around for it to find us, don’t you agree?
So, the question changes to “how”? It’s just like learning how to speak a foreign language- we need to learn how to develop our self-happiness step by step, and that’s why there are some skills you need to practice.
Have you ever asked yourself “When will I finally be happy?” Well, when you do that, you tend to become even more upset; because you are waiting for happiness to come to you. And that’s not how it works.
What are self-happiness skills?
Self-happiness skills basically help you:
•See and accept reality as it is, which might be different from what we usually believe it to be.
•Improve things that you can improve- in other words, changing things that are in your control, and for the better.
It’s the opposite of these that makes us unhappy most of the time!
How to find self-happiness
Self-happiness skills can guide us through the journey of finding happiness for ourselves. These skills can be put into the categories below. Read this list to see what skills can help increase self-happiness:
Thoughts and Emotions
It’s no secret that if we stick to our thoughts and beliefs all the time, we become inflexible, rigid, and blinkered. In other words, we stop to see what’s happening around us.
The more inflexible we are, the unhappier we feel. One example of this is the negative thoughts we keep repeating to ourselves, thoughts like “I am a weak person”. The more you believe this thought and treat it as so much more than just 5 words, the more unhappy you will feel.
We all have beliefs and thoughts, but “self-happiness” helps us treat them as beliefs and thoughts only, and not as reality.
Of course, your mind will continue to create stories that may be negative and painful – but this is only a problem if you were to believe all of them! Each of us has one or several themes of negative thinking we fall into. For example, you might say to yourself “I am bad at math”. By identifying your own theme of negative thinking, you are better able to separate yourself from it. What is your usual negative thinking about yourself? Write it down, and try to separate yourself from it!
Bodily needs: Sleeping Habits
Sleeping time is not wasted time! The less you sleep, the more are the risks of strokes and problems in memory and learning. And it doesn’t end there if you do your best every day, but don’t get enough sleep, it’s like getting lots of ingredients, but not putting them together to make a delicious meal!
Sleeping habits need to be monitored to be fixed, and sleeping in general needs discipline.
Relationships
Imagine this: If relationships were “seesaws”, then a healthy relationship would be a seesaw where both sides are in balance, and neither side is higher than the other one.
Oftentimes, our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can unbalance the seesaw. For that reason, we need skills to either keep them balanced or to get off from seesaws that cannot be balanced! Keeping this balance is an important self-happiness skill.
Happiness-19:
carefully designed activities that help
you learn self-happiness skills
To know what exactly your self-happiness may look like, it’s not enough to merely read about them. You also need to practice and apply them to your day-to-day life.
This is what Happiness-19 does- helping you learn self-happiness skills through activities, tests, journaling, and a lot more.
Happiness-19 is not about creating more positive feelings and decreasing negative ones – it is about self-happiness, and how we can live our best life by embracing all of our emotions!
