Feeling ‘happy’ is important.

I’d argue that it’s more important now than ever before because it seems to be increasingly harder to get and stay happy.

Until recently, most of us alive today- especially those of us in the Western world- haven’t lived continually through war.

We haven’t had to think about, process or react to a global pandemic.

We’ve been very fortunate to live our existence in societies that are astoundingly affluent regardless of what’s happening around the world.

Now , we’re thinking about ALL of this and so-much-more.

As a result, we’ve had to learn new ways to live.

Pivot: Noun, “the central point, pin, or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates.: ~ Oxford Dictionary.

That word, pivot has become to the buzz word to describe what we’re doing to navigate this endeavor of living post 2020.

We’ve barreled headfirst into the unknown.

We’ve switched the way we work, how we show up for family and friends, and how we process pain, loneliness, fear, and hope.

For sure, we’ve all literally become that mechanism oscillating though great resistance and resilience.

If you’re feeling the sense of heaviness because of this, you’re not alone.

According to a CNN report from February, “Only 49% of Americans were more optimistic than pessimistic about how things were going to go in the world in 2022. This was the first time since Marist (college) started asking the question in 2009 that the optimistic percentage fell below 50%. Heading into 2021, 56% of Americans had been more optimistic than pessimistic.”

Here's what I think optimism is:

• It’s a feeling of hope and possibility.

• It’s to improve instead of decline.

• Boiled down to the core elements, it’s happiness over sadness.

I truly believe we can attract happiness.

I don’t mean for this to sound trite.

We can all see what’s happening...

We’re on a rollercoaster of extreme emotions because of political, cultural, economic and societal conversations that are all at once, necessary and devastating.

When you add in the invasion of Ukraine that could escalate, we’re facing very tough times.

But the reason I think this is so important to focus on happiness right now is because we seem to be descending into an even greater collective funk.

If we’re all feeling more pessimistic that almost a decade and a half ago, it’s time for each of us to make some changes.

As the old saying goes, change begins at home.

In this case what I mean by home is your own heart, spiritual seat, ideology, or beliefs of your mind.

You create your personal sense of happiness with your mind because you filter all your experiences through it.

You can clean your mind just like you clean your house.

Take the garbage out!

You wouldn’t let garbage accumulate in the house.

You don’t want trash to fester and contaminate your house, right?

So don’t let mental garbage fester and contaminate your mind.

Let’s say you had a rough day at work.

Maybe you had a less than positive interaction with a client or co-worker.

Instead of keeping that feeling, the ‘garbage’ that has accumulated, you must get it out.

Here’s what I mean:

1. Set Boundaries.

If you bring the stresses of the day home with you by holding on to negativity or replaying difficult moments, you’re stealing that time from something that could make you happy, now.

It’s like this, the energy you spend on something that you cannot change is paid for with the currency of potential happiness.

Sandy Peckinpah, Contributor at Huff Post, writes about how to recognize when stress is stealing your joy:

“Succumbing to stress is an indicator of living a reactive life. But, you have a choice. If you deconstruct it by identifying the cause, it becomes a framework for making life more manageable. That’s leading a proactive life.”

You don’t have a time machine and you can’t go back to change the past. It happened and now it’s history.

A better way to handle a stressor is to create a boundary where you discuss the event with someone important to you for a short time, maybe like 20 minutes…

• Present the facts.

• Don’t anticipate a solution

• Just get the ‘garbage’ out of your mind.

• Then do something immediately after that makes you feel joy.

Watch your favorite TV show.

Take a walk outside and notice how many tulips you see coming up in the neighborhood.

Open a bottle of wine and plan a weekend getaway or a home project that excites you!

Setting boundaries doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

This simple time hack of taking 20 minutes to vent is ideal.

• If it helps, set the timer on your phone to do it.

Then, spend double the time or more on something that makes you happy.

If it takes me 20 minutes to vent about the garbage situation in my head, I spend 40 minutes or more doing something that brings me happiness.

These small boundaries will turn into habits, and in no time, they’ll become automatic tools you can call on to navigate all sorts of stuff.

What’s that gonna do?

Well, when your brain gets into the habit of taking the garbage out, it will soon short cut other things that tick you off too.

You’ll find that your brain will rewire faster paths to happiness because it will want the happiness more than the stress.

You’ll subconsciously begin to think, okay, let’s get this mess cleaned up (the garbage cluttering your thoughts) so I can get to the good stuff, (the reward).

2. Practice Gratitude.

For a lot of folks these days, the pursuit of happiness is tied up in external things like other people’s opinions and expectations, material stuff, or circumstances that you can’t control.

These are all black holes that suck happiness away from you.

The good news is you don’t have to let that happen because YOU are in control of your own happiness.

Take the time to acknowledge and be grateful for even the most basic things like having running water that’s both hot and cold.

Be grateful for having light in any room just by flicking a switch.

Too basic?

How about showing love to your special person when they surprise you with your favorite meal or being grateful when your teenager empties the dishwasher and puts everything away in the right place!

Start Small

Little shifts in gratitude create major changes in the way you see things.

Wayne Dwyer said, “if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

This applies beautifully to practicing gratefulness because gratefulness abolishes indifference.

A tiny shift in consistently practicing gratefulness WILL begin to create a new narrative for how you view everything around you.

Judy Moskowitz, Ph.D., M.P.H., tells Carolyn L. Todd from the blog Self, May 2020:

“Reflect while you’re doing a chore or routine that you do every day. Making your bed in the morning, unloading the dishwasher, washing your face at night—these little activities can double as the time you intentionally savor the things you are grateful for. That way it becomes habitual and doesn’t require any rearranging of your day.”

You’ll soon flip the script about how you see objects, people, and events in your life.

When you feel like you’ve made good strides with starting small, move onto a dedicated daily practice:

• Maybe it’s evening prayers?

• Maybe it’s journaling 5 things you’re grateful for each morning when having your morning coffee?

• I have a touch stone next to my bed and each night, as I lay in bed, I hold the stone in my hand and rattle off the things I’m grateful for.

I go from simple: running water, food, electricity, to more complex: health, wellness, people and money.

It’s my way of counting my blessings and acknowledging the abundance of good in my life.

The more I focus on the good, the more good come back to me.

3. Live in the moment.

Worrying about tomorrow steals your today.

I’m sure there’s a quote like that floating around out there…

When you’re on a mission to attract more happiness it’s important to understand that anticipating things that may or may not happen is a surefire way to flush any sense of happiness down the toilet.

You can’t control the unknown any more than you can change what happened yesterday.

I have a good friend who, whenever asked about how she is; she always says she’s living in the moment.

To the uninitiated, that response gets her eye rolls and a few sideways glances.

In her view, she’s saying that she’s present and taking everything – good and bad- as it comes.

There’s a beautiful peace in letting things unfold this way.

If you think about it, what choice do we really have?

You may have heard, go with the flow.

Does that annoy you?

Think about it this way:

Be like the rock in the riverbed, unmoved by the water rushing all around it.

The rock cannot stop the water just as you cannot stop time or the unfolding of your life.

It’s going to happen no matter what you want.

Time will pass and so shall you.

Is this stoicism?

Perhaps.

I like to think of this as observing the events of my day and not assigning meaning to what happens.

Here’s the truth:

NOW is all any of us have.

Charles A. Francis, author, meditation teacher and director of the Mindfulness Meditation Institute, writes in an article on Lifehack.com:

“There is no guarantee on the number of moments you will get to experience. This is extremely important to realize. No one knows when the next moment of their life is going to be taken away from them. Your next moment is not guaranteed, so why not take advantage of the one you are in?”

Of course, crappy things are going to happen.

We’re all going to experience loss and disappointments as much as great joy, surprise, and abundance.

The point is, you can’t live your life in expectation of any of it because then you’ll miss now.

When you assign meaning to the unknown, the eventual outcome will likely fall short of your expectations and that will cause unhappiness.

That loss of joy comes not only at the price of a failed expectations but at the equally high price of losing your present moments.

4. Stop Negative Self-Talk.

Treating yourself unkind is stacking the odds against happiness. We’ve all done it. That thing where you let your internal narrative run you down.

It can be for anything:

• Forgetting to pick up a carton of milk on the way home.

• Gaining 5 pounds and now your pants are tight.

• Misplacing the car keys when you’re in a hurry.

Suddenly, you start thinking, Oh you stupid asshole, what kind of a moron would let this happen? How stupid, can you be? What a loser! And worse, right?

Thinking things like this about yourself is like putting a target on your own back that your biggest bully can clearly see in their crosshairs.

You might as well be saying this trash out loud because the way it affects you is REAL.

According to an article Psychology Today, from this past February, 2022, the author, Beverly D. Flaxington, explains just how negative self-talk can become real.

“Negative self-talk doesn’t just stay in your mind, it often leads to actions you might sometimes regret. It might encourage you to “tell that other person off,” or “refuse to be taken advantage of,” or “quit this stupid boss”, or it might lead to a destructive relationship, or a breakdown in family relations, or isolating yourself from a long-time friend or relative because it helps you to justify that this is the right thing to do.”

I’m sure you can relate to this kind of relentless chatter.

A practice that resonates with me is:

if you would never say it to your best friend, then don’t say it to yourself.

Show yourself the same kindness and respect that you would show your best friend.

On your last day of life are you going to look back and think, I really should’ve really been more negative toward myself because I always felt so happy and productive afterward?

Doubt it.

You may have regrets, but I’ll bet, as you close your eyes for the last time, you won’t feel like being unkinder to yourself should’ve had more play.

5. Be Intentional.

I’m a list maker from WAY back.

I love a list!

I’ve tried planners, calendars, goal setting, you name it.

No matter what, I ALWAYS come back to my list.

I love checking tasks off my list.

It fills me with oodles of accomplishment “good feels.”

My system is nothing fancy, just a small spiral notebook with page after page of to-do’s.

I’ll sometimes make a crazy long list of stuff just to see if I can get as much done as possible.

Some days I get everything done.

Some days I’ll get only a few things done.

Sometimes I’ll move things I didn’t get done to the next day, week, month, or quarter…

I don’t abandon the items on my list because there will be a time- sooner or later- that will make sense to get that bumped item done.

I’ll often write ideas in the margins of my lists.

I call them “brain dump” ideas.

They could be fragments of an idea or things I want to do down the line.

My notebook is filled with things like this, and I find this ‘saving it for later’ approach great because I can look back and remember the spark that inspired me to add it there.

I do a look back every month and move some of these ideas up the priority list.

What does any of this have to do with being intentional?

Well, it has a lot to do with it.

• When I take the time to write out my list – an activity I do at the end of EVERY day for the next day, I’m telling myself, this is the plan for tomorrow.

• If you want to cultivate more happiness, the easiest place to start is by setting an intention to do something.

For me, my list making keeps me on track to accomplish all the things I want to do.

If I want to carve out time to come up with a new proposal for my business, work on a client project, write a blog post, start a home improvement project, it appears on my list as an intention.

• I’ve found that writing my intentions increases the likelihood of accomplishing them. There’s science behind this:

Forbes magazine senior contributor, Mark Murphy explains why you should write your goals down:

“Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered.”

• When you create an intention, you’re almost entering into a contract with yourself.

• You’ve declared what you intend to do and that constructs a foundation for making it happen.

How does this contribute to happiness?

Speaking completely from my own experience, when I fail to create my daily lists – which happens from time to time, I’m human – I find my next day or days to be difficult.

I don’t have a clear idea of what I want to do and therefore my mojo is off.

On these days I’ll usually be frustrated and moody because I haven’t planned out my intentions.

I may fumble around and cobble some sort of productivity together, but it’s always lack luster.

When I set my intentions and have a list of tasks the opposite happens.

I feel ready and excited to get going.

Even if some of the list items aren’t my favorite things to do, I still find myself much more mentally prepared to tackle them than if I didn’t make the list to begin with.

And, for the things that I’m excited to do, I get a jolt of happiness because NOW is the time that I get to do that thing.

So, give it a try. Write out a list of things you want to do tomorrow, and I guarantee you’ll feel great to check them off as you do them!

So, there you have it, 5 Tips to create more happiness

1. Set Boundaries – This is specifically about setting a boundary for how long you let a negative thoughts fester. Train yourself to get the negative ‘garbage’ out fast so you can get right on to something that brings you joy.

2. Practice Gratitude – This is about starting small with a very easy practice of acknowledging the little things you’re grateful for. Little things can turn into bigger things to be grateful for fast. Change how you look at things and the things you look at change.

3. Live in the Moment – This is all about accepting that you can’t change NOW. Good or bad, your present moment is what you have, and you can resist this fact and be miserable or you can be like the rock in the riverbed not resisting the flow of water all around it. Not resisting the flow of life will help you open your eyes to the happiness of all your moments.

4. Stop Negative Self-Talk – This is simply silencing your inner critic. Remember, if you wouldn’t say a horrible and hurtful thing to your best friend, don’t say it to yourself.

5. Be Intentional – When you set an intention, you create a contract with yourself. Make an intentional commitment to do something is a promise that you will get it done. If you don’t prioritize you, you’ll soon fail to prioritize anything or anyone else.

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Michael is Principal designer and blogger at Michael Helwig Interiors in beautiful Buffalo, New York. Since 2011, he’s a space planning expert, offering online interior e-design services for folks living in small homes, or for those with awkward and tricky layouts. He’s a frequent expert contributor to many National media publications and news outlets on topics related to decorating, interior design, diy projects, and more. Michael happily shares his experience to help folks avoid expensive mistakes and decorating disappointments. You can follow him on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook @interiorsmh.