Having a tough staying positive? You’re not the only one. At one time or another we all could use a little boost. Here are 5 simple tricks to help you get happy and stay happy.

1. Fake It Until You Make It

I’m not exactly sure why this works, but you can actually trick yourself into a better mood by simply faking a smile. The idea has gained a number of proponents in the psychological community since it was first proposed by Charles Darwin (as the Facial Feedback Hypothesis) in the late 19th century.

A fake smile feels unwelcome when you’re down, but within minutes, you’ll find it difficult to hold back a real smile. Once you get the a real smile going, other people tend to smile back and react to you more positively, boosting your mood even further. It’s a vicious cycle of happiness.

2. Stage A Mood Revolution

Are your moods like unwelcome house guests? Do they move in unexpectedly, make a mess, and then leave whenever they feel like it? Instead of pulling the covers over your head and waiting for your moods to move on, consider letting go of the perception that you are at the mercy of your moods.

Emotions don’t have to be long term guests. If your negative mood is getting in the way, tell it to pack its crap and move on. Then, invite happiness over for a lengthy stay. I know this can be difficult in some situations, but creating the idea that your moods are temporary and under your control are the important steps toward larger happiness.

3. Emotionally Divest From Your Roles

Do you define yourself by your job? Before you say “no”, answer this question: What do you do for a living? Did your answer start with “I work as…” or “I’m a…”? Considering the large proportion of time that people spend at work, most will answer the second way, indicating that they at least partially define themselves by their job. If you were ready to say “no” and still said “I’m a…”, you’re defining yourself by your role without being conscious that you’re doing it. And that ain’t good.

Consider the extreme example where someone fully defines themselves by their job. They eat, sleep, and live their work at the expense of everything else. They are not Jim or Mary. They are Jim the senior technical officer or Mary the account executive. If you’ve ever worked with people like this, you know that when they are faced with an idea that challenges their role, the situation becomes very personal and very frustrating very quickly because they have a large emotional investment in the outcome. Do you ever wonder what happens to people like this when they no longer have their role? What do they have then?

When we define ourselves by our roles, our happiness becomes dependent upon our success in them, and we risk losing an important key to happiness: a solid sense of self.

When you consciously ask yourself whether you are merely donning the costume that goes with your role, or whether you’re defining yourself by your costume, you have a better chance of keeping your sense of self in tact no matter what is going on around you. Mishaps are no longer personal insults. If a role makes you unhappy, you can shed it for something that brings you greater happiness. When you are emotionally independent of your role, a career change doesn’t take on the weight of redefining yourself. It’s merely a costume change. If you keep what you do for a living out of who you are as a person, you’ll find that in the long run you get a better sense of who you are and what really makes you happy.

This is why I say to #1GF! as she leaves for work every day, “Remember that you’re only playing the role of a worker today. It’s not who you really are.”

4. Dream A Better Dream

If you close your eyes and imagine an orange, you can see the skin, feel the texture, and maybe even imagine the smell, but no matter how good your imagination is, the orange only exists in your mind. Obviously, right? Now, think of the last stranger who smiled at you as they passed by. Why did they smile at you? Was it because your clothes made you look funny? Was it because they thought you were attractive? No matter which way you might have perceived it, it’s very possible that the person never noticed you and was simply smiling about something they saw on television last night.

Because you have no access to the person’s real motivation, what you perceived about the encounter is nothing more than your brain making up a story to fit with how you felt at the time. That’s why eye witnesses are unreliable and ten people can inexplicably see the same event different ways. Everything we see is merely an interpretation of reality. By the time our perceptions make it to our memories, they’re about as real as that orange you thought of earlier. In truth, we are all walking through our own personal illusions.

If you’re going to create an illusion, why not create it in a way that benefits you? I’m not saying you should make up a fantasy world where you’re the King or Queen of Candy Cane Lane, but if you have a choice of whether you perceive things negatively or positively, why not opt for the positive? If the truth of the matter will only exist in your mind, why not choose to believe that the person you passed was smiling at you because you’re hotter than a two dollar pistol?

By escaping your own negative vision of reality and creating a world that benefits you, you make a positive mood much easier to achieve and happiness isn’t far behind.

5. Kill Your Television

You want to be happier? Shut off the news. The goal of the news is not to inform, but to sell advertising. The news stations know that more people linger to view a car accident than will pull off the road to watch the flowers grow, so the news has become an hour of rapes, murders, theft, and tragedy. The more sensational and gruesome, the more people are interested.

All that negative information takes its toll by coloring your world. Most of the time, the news stories have no bearing on your life and provide you with nothing but an uneasy feeling that the world is a much scarier place than you had realized. Even though the people that you deal with on a daily basis seem nice, the world must be extremely dangerous because the news says it is. They wouldn’t give that information to millions of people if it weren’t true…

And once you’re feeling a bit insecure, they hit you with commercial after commercial that are built to make you feel inadequate enough to buy something. Although inadequacy and fear create wealth for the news station, it does so by robbing you of your feelings of safety and self worth. Good for them. Not so good for you. By shutting the news off, you can leave behind the fear and paranoia that the news wants to sell you and return to a view of the world based upon your personal experience. That more balanced view can open you up to happiness that you were once afraid to explore.

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Posted in Happy