Start your day with gratitude and a prayer
Wake up and say a little prayer in bed itself. But don’t ask for anything. Instead give thanks. Give thanks for the fact that your eyes opened, that you have a chance to spend time with your friends and family and a chance to do that which you had put on the back burner. If you do want to ask for something, ask for strength, courage, love and compassion. Do not ask for material possessions. It is a waste of your prayer.
Train your happiness muscle
Happiness just like any other muscle in your body that needs to be worked upon and trained. You don’t get fabulous biceps overnight, do you? Likewise, you need to build upon your happiness muscle bit-by-bit, day-by-day. How do you do this? Look for the positive as opposed to the negative, that’s all. This simple shift in thinking is paradigm in changing your happiness quotient. View the glass as half full as opposed to half empty and you are already at 50 per cent of your happiness quota.
Get active
Sitting on your backside watching television and eating chips sounds fun, but will not make you happy in the long run. What will make you happy is that one hour of physical activity that you engage in. What will make you happy is finding a new skill or hobby or passion. Getting active, physically and mentally, pushes your brain out of its comfort zone and puts it on the path to positivity.
Spend time with family and friends
These days, quality time with friends and family is out the window. With long hours of work, social media distractions and the lure of the telly, spending time with your family and friends engaging in good ole back slapping laughter is a skill long forgotten. Get back to the old days. Turn off the static. Have game nights instead. Reconnect with your parents and grandparents. Stop surfing the internet because there’s no point sitting hours in a room with each other not chatting to one another. Instead, even if you spend one hour with your family, make it a value filled one.
Look beyond yourself
There is no joy in being selfish. Sure, retail therapy works wonders and it may fill that small hole, but overtime the hole gets larger and there will come a time when it will swallow you up whole. The greatest joy in life comes when you look towards satisfying the needs of others – be it making a cooked meal for your lonely neighbour or giving the leper on the street an old pair of pants or even helping an old person cross the road. At some point, you must engage in more meaningful long term activity, but to start with random acts of kindness will help you get started on your road to happiness.
Research shows that as you grow older, you actually get wiser and happier. So don’t be afraid. Embrace each and every phase of your life and live that phase to the very fullest. Life is going to go on, no matter what you do. As they say “Time and tide wait for no one” So embrace it and live it.
Cheers to happiness!!!!!
XOXO
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Written by Fleur Xavier and Nethra Raghuraman on 9th Jun 2014