New Year—Fresh Start

The new year just started and you have an opportunity for a fresh start.  What will you do with that?
Increasingly, research is showing that happiness is something that can be influenced willfully.  That is, we have the power, as thinking organisms, to choose to increase our happiness.
No, you can’t win the lottery by believing that you can.  You can’t make someone fall in love with you by making a wish.  
But, you can increase the level of your own personal happiness in the world by working at it.  Below are three ways that have been demonstrated to be successful at increasing happiness.

Gratitude—This is not limited to thanking people for gifts. This refers more accurately to an attitude. It is a way of thinking about what you are experiencing. For example, on a large scale—are you dodging bullets or bandits on a daily basis while you scavenge for food? No? Be grateful, because for some people that is a daily reality. Did you go to see sleep hungry last night because there wasn’t any food for you? No? Be grateful, because for many people in this country and around the world that is a daily reality. On a less life-threatening scale, do you have friends and/or family who care about you? Do you have sufficient health and strength to be able to work? to play? If things haven’t gone exactly as you wished, is there a bright side to how they did go? Gratitude is an attitude. The experience of gratitude clearly contributes strongly to our sense of our own happiness. Stop and focus your mind on what there is for which to be grateful. Make it a daily habit.

Be an active participant in your life, not a victim. To the degree to which you feel that you are helpless, you will be less happy. No, you are not omnipotent. You cannot change everything that is imperfect in your life. But you can understand that you are the primary architect of your life. Make choices and make things happen. If you sit back and watch your life happen, you are unlikely to be satisfied with what you see. If you engage and construct, you will feel more the master of your own universe. And you are much more likely to be happy, even with an imperfect outcome. For example, if you are unhappy with your body’s shape, level of fitness, or health, you could sit back and whine about the holiday goodies that attacked you while you were just standing there minding your own business and that cursed slow metabolism that you inherited. Or you can go to the gym, or throw in that workout video, or throw on a pair of sneakers. And you can choose to continue those healthier choices even after January turns into February. Recognize that you are making choices, all day, every day. You are choosing your life—if you don’t like it the way it is, choose differently.

Acceptance is another key to happiness. The Buddhists have known for ages that “desire” has an ugly downside to it. In this schema, “desire” means wanting something to be different from what it is; and needing it to be different in order to be happy is a sure way to un-happiness. Acceptance, then, is developing the capacity to be okay even when things are not exactly as you’d like them to be. No, this doesn’t mean that you stop trying to change or improve things (yourself, your relationships, your country, the state of the environment). It does mean that while you work at making positive changes, you also accept that some things may not, cannot, or will not change by your actions or will change frustratingly slowly. And you do not allow your happiness to be dependent on that change. It doesn’t mean insisting that you’re fine with things as they are; only that you accept that in fact they are as they are. Paradoxically, by accepting that things are as they are, you are able to persist, without a sense of defeat, in working at changing them.

You’ve started a new year. Here you have three ways to help you make it your best yet. Oh, and here’s another guideline—start now. Success only happens after you begin, not while you’re waiting for the “right” moment.

Happy New Year!