How to be a Happy Person

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that being happy is a choice. If you have heard that and have said no it’s not THAT’S YOUR PROBLEM RIGHT THERE! You refuse to believe that happiness is something that you can have regardless of your circumstances. Your idea of happiness is just askew. Happiness is not a gift, it’s not something that’s handed to you it’s something you work at. Do you ever see someone who is in really good shape and think, someone gave him those muscles? NO, you think man that guy must go to the gym a lot. Think of happiness just like muscles. Your mind is a muscle, muscles can be manipulated with drugs like Zoloft, Cannabis, and Xanax, etc.

You can use drugs to trick your brain into thinking you are happy but true happiness, like any other muscle in your body needs to be stimulated and “trained” to grow and work properly. You can learn to zero in on happy thoughts and encourage yourself to have more of them. It is really that simple and that is the choice of happiness. Deciding not to allow yourself to dwell on the negative and focus on the positive. Your unhappiness also comes from within so you just need to learn how to chase it out. Just like happiness, unhappiness is a choice, if you are not working on one you are feeding the other.

I understand that sometimes in life there are things that can happen to you that are out of your control and can make you feel sad. You cannot shut off the feelings that are accompanied by the loss of a loved one but you need to learn the healthy way to deal with that so that your life doesn’t have to come to a screeching halt. Here is the first thing you need to remind yourself of when bad things happen: “I am not my situation”. Separating yourself as an individual from the things that happen to you is the first step to taking control of your life. You can be in a bad situation, be having a bad day but taking hold of the fact that your circumstances do not define you as a person is the first and probably most necessary step to embracing happiness. So now that you understand you are not your bullshit relationship, you are not your shitty house, you are not a disease or ailment, let’s take a better look at who you are.

You need to really understand what happiness is to have it in your life. Happiness is not walking around all day with a shit-eating grin on your face, it is merely being content with what you have. I’m not talking about material possessions, that’s just stuff, you lose stuff and when shit gets better you get more stuff. I understand that some stuff is more fun than others but you can be happy without stuff. There are things in life that money can’t buy.

There are human beings who can choose to share their lives with you and the experiences you share with them are completely irreplaceable, BUT you will miss out on those connections if you’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself. If you don’t like your life; change it. Don’t like the car you have, do everything you can to make enough money to get a better one. The majority of the obstacles in your life are barriers you put up for yourself. Tear down those confining walls and build something new, the first step is making the choice to change and improve your life. The first step is changing the way you think. The first step is to change your mind.

1. Change Your Mind

Changing your mind means 2 things. Change your opinion on things and change the way you think. You are in control of your life mind body and soul. If you want to do some rewiring upstairs that is entirely up to you. To change your life and better your situation you need to ask yourself why you are unhappy.

Don’t have money, you can fix that. Don’t have friends, you can fix that. Love of my life left me, let them go and use this time to heal and improve yourself. If you’re a good person on the inside you can be happy. If you are a bad person: CHANGE! Are you a mean person, are you an angry person, are you a negative person, do you hurt other people? If you answered yes to any of those it doesn’t mean that you can’t change. YOU are the reason you are mean, don’t like it, change.

You have the opportunity to change anything you want about your life and if you are not currently happy and want to be, you need to change. Before you change anything around you, you need to CHANGE YOUR MIND. Changing your mind can change the world or at the very least change your world. To change the world, you first need to change the way you view the world. By deciding to see things in a more positive way you can find happiness.

Being a good person has nothing to do with how much money you make or where, if, and or how you pray. Being a good person is all about treating people with kindness, even if they don’t deserve it. YOU can treat others the way you want to be treated but not everyone lives their life in that way. Just remind yourself that you are not in control of how others treat you and be good to others regardless. When being nice to someone who does not show you the same courtesy, do not go out on a limb and do not take it personally. Good people will always be kind to everyone and bad people will always be good to people who can do something for them, and bad to those who cannot.

Don’t waste your energy trying to change anyone. You are never in control of the way people treat you and the things that happen to you but you are always in control of your reaction to them. YOU are the master of your own story, YOU are the only one who gets to determine how you will be treated. If someone treats you poorly you do not have the ability to change what has happened nor their behavior but you do have the option to remove yourself from the situation. YOU always have the power to walk away and say “never again”. It doesn’t matter who they are, family, friend, significant other, boss, you have the power to walk away. Remind yourself that NO ONE deserves to be treated poorly and don’t ever give someone the opportunity to do it twice. Good people treat others with kindness.

With that being said sometimes a big part of changing your mind is separating yourself from unhealthy relationships. My best friend in high school was the most negative person you have ever met in your life next to my father. All we ever did was talk shit about everyone and everything. It was really what we did to entertain ourselves. She got pregnant at the age of 15 and her baby’s daddy was not a fan of mine, so since he was around all the time, I was not. So, I made new friends.

My new friends very rarely had anything negative to say about others. It was only then that I realized that the world was not really that shitty of a place, I was just looking at it from a shitty perspective. You’ve heard the term “rose colored glasses”. The term means that through a happy place in your life everything looks dandy. I was looking at like through shit-colored glasses and I finally decided just to take them off.

Taking off your shit-colored glasses can change everything for you. Deciding to remove the tainted view from your life is life changing. Changing your mind about your perspective on the world around you is a necessary part of becoming a happy person. Excluding negative people from your life is a great way to clear your negative view. If you make the choice to change the way you see things, with no one negative there to bring up the negative it kind of just fades away.

2. Stop Watching The News

When I was 14 years old I got a T.V. for Christmas. It was 1996 and I fell asleep watching the news in Denver Colorado, my hometown. If you are not from here you might not automatically think of the huge news story in Denver Colorado around Christmas time in 1996 but to the rest of us Colorado natives, the only thing anyone was talking about was JonBenet Ramsey. The 6-year-old girl was found dead on Christmas morning in her parents’ home in Boulder Colorado. On the evening of December 25, 1996, that was all anyone knew. Every night I would fall asleep watching the news and little by little the details started to unfold. I thought for sure anyone of those nights an arrest would be made but as we all know now that never came.

Every night I would watch the news waiting for new information on the case, in between the local news of daily crime and death just kept rolling in with no end. In March of 1997 the Heaven’s Gate Cult committed suicide and every night they had new info on that, in July Andrew Cunanan killed Gianni Versace at the entrance to his estate. He was not immediately caught and the news relived the manhunt for weeks until Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris the following month. For years this was my routine. Watch the news and fall asleep.

Years later when I really started to struggle with my depression I realized a huge source or my feelings of helplessness was the news. There was so much ugly in the world and even though the news gives us all of the info to know what was going on in the world the reality is that no one cares. We know people are dying in Sierra Leon and Syria but we do nothing. Every night and now a day every day all day we are bombarded with information to the point that it is overwhelming.

Every time we turn around there is a new massacre, death tolls rise on every issue under the sun. So instead of subjecting myself to being bombarded by what seems to be an endless death count, I only google the stories that interest me. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and like it or not you can’t ignore the news there. So when I see a headline that looks like something that I need to know, I Google it.

Seriously think about it. Other than traffic and weather, what is on the news that you need to know? Not to mention the fact that there is no news source out there that is not biased in one way or another. I don’t need someone’s opinion on the facts, I just want to know the facts. Be honest with yourself. What good is it to be “in the know”? Once I cut down on the news it was a lot easier to see the world in a better light because I was more focused on the things around me.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for the people affected by war on the other side of the ocean but I do not have the resources to help them from here and I have to accept that. If I did I might do something about it but since I can’t I cannot spend my time feeling bad for them. That doesn’t help anyone.

Call it callus, call it whatever you like, studies show that being too empathetic can be bad for your health. Need more proof that knowing too much is bad for your health? Look at each and every President of the United States for the last 50 years. Google what they look like when they started their presidency and when they finished. They age quickly and terribly. The world’s problems are just too much for one person to handle. When your main focus is on you and the people you love it’s a lot easier to feel like the world is not out to get you.

If you scale back on your news intake, it will help you find calm within yourself immensely. It’s a wonderful thing to care about others but when you are literally bombarded by the world’s problems it can leave you feeling helpless. It’s very healthy to step away from all of that and focus on your own life first and foremost. When you do step away from it you realize that there are more good people in the world then there are shitty ones. The news mostly focuses on the shitty ones but the majority of the people in the world are good.

3. It could be Worse

We all go through bad times in our lives but you have to remember, no matter what you are going through, someone somewhere is happier with less than what you have. You lost your finger in a firework accident, there’s a little kid in India who lost their arms when they touched the electrical wire near the train tracks.

You couldn’t get tickets to your favorite band. Some people in some parts of the world have never had access to a radio. Your crush started dating someone else, a woman in Afghanistan was burnt and permanently disfigured when a man she refused for a date threw acid in her face. Things can always be worse, no matter how bad things are there is always something to be grateful for. Unless it cost you your life and you do not have the opportunity to feel one way or another about it, it could always be worse. That girl with the disfigured face was grateful that she got to see her loved ones again. She was grateful that she wasn’t raped then forced to marry her rapist or worse, murdered by him simply because she said no.

I grew up poor and it was very hard for me to understand why all of my friends at school didn’t live in their grandma’s basement. Why was it just my family? When I got older I was angry that we didn’t have money to buy name brand anything and I couldn’t have all the cool gear that was in style back then. I remember asking my mother for these things and her saying no because they were too expensive and that I should be thankful for my Target shoes. Then she said to me: “Have you ever seen your grandpa’s feet? They look like that because the man never had a pair of shoes in his size until he was an adult who could buy his own shoes.” My grandfather had the nastiest looking feet you have ever seen in your life.

He was a good man and a hard worker but half of his foot almost looked like they started that Chinese foot binding stuff on him and then quit halfway through. He had corns and bunions and calluses everywhere and every toe had a long golden werewolf claw on it. His feet were truly the things that nightmares are made of and my mother was 100% right. My mother was 100% right about a lot of shit but I’m not going to get into that now. It really dawned on me then that even though I was mad I couldn’t have Nike’s there are some kids who don’t get shoes at all. There are charities all over the place dedicated to providing kids with shoes because there are so many kids who’s families simply cannot afford shoes.

My husband’s mother always used to say “we are all just one mistake away from being on the streets.” Stability is an illusion we create for ourselves. Especially in American society where our economy is based on debt it only takes one little set back to send everyone spiraling into poverty. You can lose your job for any reason they choose to fire you and it can all just come crashing down. So when things go wrong, if you don’t lose everything be glad for what you do have. You may have lost your job but it could be worse.

4. No One Else Can Make You Happy

Understanding that no one else is ever going to “make” you happy is an important part of being happy. Understanding that happiness comes from you is a huge step when it comes to changing your mind. Spending time with someone who makes you smile is not the same as someone making you happy. Cat videos make us all smile but expecting other people to be the force for your happiness is how you end up a crazy cat lady or guy.

Sharing moments with certain people can make the moment more enjoyable but you need to take responsibility for your own happiness. Your feelings are yours and yes people can hurt them sometimes just like they can make you feel good but pinning your happiness or lack thereof on someone else is just a recipe for failure.

You need to understand that your unhappiness comes from negative thoughts. Focusing on the negative is a sure-fire way to ensure that your misery will linger. As mentioned in previous sections you need to expel negativity from your life and that decision starts with you. I am telling you this but unless you decide to take this advice it’s not going to do anything. As you get older and mature you understand that other people’s bullshit can really bring you down and you start to be more selective about who’s bullshit you want to put up with.

It’s true that everyone has baggage and some have more than others but happy people are less willing to waste their time on someone who wallows in their misery. There are millions of people walking this earth that have been through a lot more than you can ever even imagine and they manage to get through every day with a smile on their face. If you ever in your life want to be someone who lays in their bed at night and feel content, you need to understand that it is something that you need to do for yourself.

This lesson goes right back to step one “Change your mind” decide that you are no longer going to allow negative thoughts and feelings to dictate your mood. When you feel them creeping in and taking hold just think of something to be grateful for.

Think about the people who love you. If you feel that no one does it’s probably because you are a negative person that no one wants to be around because you bring them down. You most likely only hang out with people because you expect their company to make you feel better but you probably just end up making them feel worse. Don’t be that person. Behind your back, I’m sure they talk about how they hang out with you because they pity you.

5. Let go of the past

Just like everything else on this list this final step is easier said than done. You probably don’t realize it but holding on to the past is a lot more harmful than you realize. Until you are ready to let go of your past emotional trauma you can’t really be happy. They call it baggage for a reason, you carry it with you everywhere and it’s literally weighing you down and you most likely don’t even realize it. There are things that happen in life to all of us that once that event has passed we are never the same again.

If you have an event like that in your past and the memory of it brings you nothing but pain, let it go. Imagine the event as a vehicle and you’re in the middle of the desert. The car was once very special to you but the engine is blown beyond repair. Other drivers keep coming by and asking if you’d like a lift but you don’t want to leave the shell of the vehicle that once took you everywhere you wanted to go. You need to ask yourself; what good it’s doing anyone to just stick by this vehicle? By refusing a ride because you cannot take the car with you, you will forever just be in this one place. You will never move forward or backward and no matter what you do the events that led up to the catastrophic combustion of the engine in your car, at this point cannot be reversed.

Why are you staying in this place? You are literally in the middle of nowhere. Make the choice to move on. The essence of the vehicle is gone, it’s just a shell now, an empty vestal. What you loved about it and what it did for you is no more. You have to accept the fact that it’s just time to go.

Once you decide it’s time to move on you can find happiness again. Don’t get me wrong, mourning and processing loss are very normal and healthy things to do but be sure that you are not lingering in limbo while life is passing you by. You will never discover new things and make new memories staying in the same spot. Make sure that you never take any day for granted and most importantly never ever pass up an opportunity to tell someone who is important to you how you really feel. Start to focus on the present and after a while, when the bad times are far behind you, you will be proud of yourself because you made it through.

Some people just cannot let go of the past, like Al Bundy. For all you young people Al Bundy was a character from a T.V. show in the 90’s called Married with Children. Al was married to a beautiful but pretty useless woman named Peg and they had 2 pretty equally useless kids, Kelly and Bud. Peg didn’t work and Al struggled to support his family as a shoe salesman. Given any opportunity, Al would tell the tails of his glory days as a football star in high school. All of his life was dismal in comparison to some shit that happened 20 years ago, in high school. He refuses to apply himself and find a better job and blames his wife, his kids and even his neighbor for all of his misery because he can’t let go of the glory days at good ol’ Polk High. DON’T BE THAT GUY! High School is not the best time of your life and thinking that it is will bring you nothing but disappointment in the future. High school is the best time of your life for people who fail as adults.

Shit went bad before, try again. The only true failure you can ever know in life is to give up. If you try and try and fail you will always know you tried your hardest and it just wasn’t meant to be and then you move on. There is no rule anywhere that says that failure is synonymous with mistakes. You really can do everything right and still fail. If you try and fail it can lead you to a better path or teach you that the path you thought you wanted, wasn’t really what you wanted after all but dwelling in previous failures prevents progression. Study your past mistakes, own your past mistakes but do not dwell on past mistakes. Letting a shitty past prevent a beautiful future is the worst kind of failure I know. It is literally giving up before you even tried. The only thing worse than failure is regret. If you never try, you will never know.

Clinical depression and unhappiness are not the same thing.

I want to take a moment to address the difference between unhappiness and depression. Being unhappy for extended periods of time can mean that you’re a pessimist, which can be helped and changed by following the 5 steps above. If you cannot shake the feelings of hopelessness even when things are good you may be depressed. If you are depressed you really should seek help.

Feeling sad from time to time is totally normal but if you find yourself sad and hopeless for extended periods of time and you just can’t shake it off you probably want to go see a psychiatrist. Therapy is a great way to handle depression if drugs are not the right solution for you. If you don’t think therapy is for you I highly suggest trying a few more therapists before you give up on the idea entirely. Therapists are just human beings and most have very different styles and specialties. They are not all the same. There is a difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Do your homework and know the difference before you seek help.