How to Be Happy Once Again

Happiness is for sure the best experience of our lives. It won’t be wrong to state that we are living in pursuit of happiness. Take a moment and think about all of your dreams and goals, your intentions about the time that’s yet to come, isn’t it all focused on a journey towards being happier? Whether we realize it or not, a single goal in life that is common for all of us is to be happy. What differs among people is their individual outlook and perspective about happiness.

It is not an uncommon sight to find someone who associates his happiness with the bigger achievements of his life. For instance, your friend may perceive happiness as the emotion that he’ll face once he gets that big raise at work that’s been in the pipeline for a few months. For your brother, buying his dream car finally could be happiness, or for you, getting a new apartment for your family could be it. The excitement and joy associated with such accomplishments are surely destined to make us happy. But in a wild chase for these achievements, we fail to recognize and appreciate the happiness concealed in our day to day lives.

Truth is, it’s exciting that you are in charge of determining whether you would like to wait for years before being truly happy about your big accomplishment, or would you want to savor the little moments and experience the associated happiness every day. There are tips and tricks which can be conveniently applied to prolong any of your positive experiences. It is well within your power to make sure that you recognize and seize the positive experience, appreciate it, and prolong the derived feeling of happiness. Here are a few of the simple strategies to help you extend the experience of happiness.

 

1. Be Happy Alone

More often than not, the reason why our positive experiences and the associated feelings are short-lived is that our mind keeps wandering in the thoughts of the past or the future. Haven’t you been with your best friends and having a time that has a potential to make the best of your life memories, and yet your mind just wouldn’t stop overanalyzing your past experiences or overthinking about the future ones that are yet to come? In order to prolong your experience of happiness, it is imperative that you focus on the “here and now”.

If you find it hard to let go of the unnecessary thoughts, a few minutes of meditation and mindfulness can work wonders for you. The ancient Buddhist practice is known to clear up your head, stimulate the hormonal production that uplifts your mood, and lend you a hand in seizing the day. It brings you back to the present moment and enables you to experience it to the fullest. With a few minutes of meditation, you can get the most out of the present moment and prolong the experience, and fill yourself with positivity for a longer period of time.

 

2. Experience and Enjoy the Present Moment

The principle of savoring any moment or experience dictates that the slower you consume the experience, the better it will be for prolonging the feeling of associated happiness and positivity. While it depends on the individual experience that you are having, such a technique is particularly useful when it comes to devouring your favorite food, consuming a glass of your favorite drink, or perhaps having an intimate moment with your loved one.

Why do you think it is a natural instinct for you to take your time with that last slice of Pizza? Why do the people tend to take only a small quantity of their drink in the glass and sip on it for a few minutes? It’s only because the experience is savored and the sense of joy is remarkably more lasting when you take your time in consuming it. Remember, it’s your moment. No one can steal it from you, it can’t disappear, and it certainly isn’t a race. Take all the time that you need with it. You can think of it simply as the more time you invest in experiencing the moment, the longer the joy will stay with you.

 

3. Share and Prolong Your Happiness

Yes, we know. It goes like, “Sharing is caring”. But what if we told you that sharing is prolonging as well? If you have had an experience filled with happiness and you would like to savor it for a long time, the simplest yet the most effective strategy to deploy is to share it. Everyone has friends, siblings, cousins, etc. to whom they build a habit of telling everything. You can contact them and share your experience with them. It essentially enables you to relive the moment and kindle the associated happiness yet another time.

What’s interesting is that you don’t have to always find another person to share your experience. In an event that you currently have no longer with you with whom you can share the experience, you can simply choose to share it with yourself. Merely by reflecting on your happiness filled experience, you can prolong the feelings of positivity. All you have to do is sit back, relax, take a moment and think of what it felt like when you were experiencing it. Tell yourself how amazing it was and how lucky you are to have had the opportunity to have an experience like that.

 

4. Write About Your Happy Experience

You can think of this strategy as an extension of the last one. Another tried and tested tip to savor your happy experience is to journal it. How you choose to journal your experience is entirely on you. Some people choose to write about it once it is over to relive parts of the moment again. Others may choose to click pictures while the moment is being experienced.

Taking pictures is a fantastic way of savoring the moment. It isn’t only a way to appreciate the moment in the present, but it also preserves the memory so that you can look back even after several years and get to relive the joy that you felt in those moments. A word of cautions, though, focusing too much on photography can be counteractive as it disables you from being in the moment, in the first place.

If you are choosing to write about your experience in hopes of savoring it, it is recommended to do it as soon as possible. The reason being, the sooner you write, the more detailed will be your recollections, and the more effective your journal will be in letting you savor your happy experience.

 

5. Spread The Happiness and Make Others Happy

Remember that happiness is contagious. By spreading it among the people around you, you can strengthen the feeling of happiness for yourself. In an event that you have had a positive experience and you are looking forward to prolonging the feeling of joy and happiness, a commendable way for you to accomplish that is to be the reason behind making someone else happy.

It could really be the little acts of giving a compliment to someone, encouraging someone to achieve their goals, help someone who is in need, or simply just keeping a smile on your face. Such small gestures are highly effective in prolonging your happy experience and enabling you to relish it for a long time. You can express your gratitude for to the shopkeeper, your gardener, a janitor at work and the sense of joy that will run through your veins will be inexplicable. Stop taking things for granted and start showing your love for the people who matter the most in your life. It’s the only way of living a satisfying life that is filled with joy and a feeling of happiness with permanence.

 

Final Note

Now that you are familiar with a few of the top tips that you apply for savor your experience and prolong the associated happiness and positivity, you are in a much better position to get the most out of your experiences from here on. When it comes to adding the ingredient of satisfaction to your life and being in charge of your own happiness, there is nothing that works as impeccably as savoring the relevant experiences. It is crucial to realize that like so many other things in life, what matters with regard to your happy experiences is the quality and not the quantity. It is not the number of such experiences that you have, neither it is the intensity and how vibrant it is, all that matters is your capability to extract as much happiness from each and every single one of your experiences as you can. Your experiences can be trivial, but the power to find happiness in each one of these is concealed within you.

The majority of us are literally rushing through life and are always in a pursuit for the next thrill that our lives have in store for us. Along the way, however, we fail to recognize all the “high” that we have already experienced.