How to Increase Happiness (3 Simple Ways, Proven by Science)

Want to learn how to increase happiness levels? This is the blog post you need right now.

You’ll learn 3 simple things — all backed by science — that you can do in 10 minutes or less.

How to Increase Happiness

You’re Not Alone

Let’s be honest we all want to increase our happiness, don’t we?

It would appear so when you learn over 10,000 people have searched, “how to be happy” on Google lately. And given one study found nearly half of the people asked hadn’t felt true happiness lately, and a quarter had forgotten what it means to feel truly happy.

This breaks my heart, and is one of the reasons I became a health coach — because I want people to not just be healthy physically, but mentally and emotionally too.

What Makes People Happy

I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people happy and trying to understand what happy people do. So, over the years, I’ve learnt and tried a lot of things.

And ultimately, I realised that happiness is an inside game. First, you have to decide you want to be happy. Then you have to make a conscious effort every single day to be happy — through a mixture of attitude, the right actions and training your brain to see more positive than negative.

Commit To Being Happy

Learning how to increase your happiness, is a lifelong commitment, and it takes work. Like everything else we want to achieve in our lives, increasing our happiness takes time, consistent practice and persistence.

Learning how to increase happiness is also releasing that you won’t always feel happy — or be happy every single day — and learning to be be okay with that. Accepting it’s normal and that our range of negative and positive emotions are all healthy aspects of being human. And that some days will just be harder than others.

Delaying Happiness

With all of that said, I appreciate that sometimes, between work, seeing your family and friends, all the responsibilities you’ve got and life admin, it can seem impossible to find any time to focus on increasing your happiness at all.

Which can lead to us telling ourselves we’ll be happier in the future — once you’re on top of things — once you’ve got caught up at work, achieved that promotion, sorted things with your mum, got the washing and cleaning done, and the weight you’ve put on.

Put another way, you tell yourself you’ll be happy when you’ve ticked-off your goals — you’ll be happy in the future when you get “all the things” done.

Which Comes First?

But let me ask you a thought-provoking question:

Does happiness come before success? Or, success before happiness?

Look at most people and you’ll see they’ve decided success comes first.

They either consciously or unconsciously believe success comes first. In other words, they’ve told themselves once they’re successful — once they’ve reached their goals — they’ll be happy.

If this were true though anyone who has ever accomplished anything in their life — a dream or goal they had — would be happy. Yet, we all know this isn’t the case for ourselves or others.

Do you know what actually happens when we reach our goals? Instead of happiness increasing, our definition of success changes. Meaning, that once we achieve our goal, we end up setting a new, bigger one. And consequently putting our happiness off again until we achieve our next goal.

As a result, and especially if we’re not aware of what we’re doing, our happiness doesn’t increase permanently no matter what we achieve. And maybe worst of all, we can’t work out why.

We all do this by the way — we all put out happiness on hold. It’s human nature and also what Society has taught us.

The good news is this way of thinking is simply an unhelpful mindset about happiness and success — one we can easily change. Keep reading to learn how.

Changing Your Mindset About Happiness

Research has proven that the relationship between success and happiness works the other way round to what most of us think. In other words, happiness comes before success, not the reverse of that.

Even more interesting is that science shows that happiness literally fuels our performance — it makes us healthier, more productive and better at what we do — and therefore increases our chances of success and achieving our goals.

So, now you know happiness fuels your performance and success — rather than happiness being the reward for your success — let’s look at how you can increase your happiness levels right now.

Learn How to Increase Happiness With These 3 Simple Tips

These simple tips, all backed by science, have been proven to increase your happiness, both immediately and in future:

Happiness Tip #1

Have Something to Look Forward to

Whatever you enjoy doing, be sure to schedule those things into your life. Whether that’s reading, a cuppa with friends or a holiday, plan and organise these things. Whether you’re able to do them tonight, at the weekend, or in 2 months, choose something you want to do and set a date for when you’ll.

Putting things you love doing in your calendar, and then reminding yourself often that they’re coming up, is a great way to lift your spirits in the moment and increase your baselines happiness.

So, stop waiting until you’ve achieved this or that to do the things you enjoy. Make a plan for them right now.

Since the anticipation of doing something you enjoy, can light up pleasure centres in your brain as much as the activity itself, make sure you put an activity you love on your calendar now. And keep reminding yourself of it.

Happiness Tip #2

Make Your Environment More Positive

Wether it’s at home or work, take a look around you, and decide where you can make your daily environment a little more positive.

For example, think about where you work. What feelings does your space create? If you love flowers, candles and quotes, surround yourself with these things. And anything else that makes you feel good. They’ll give you a boost of positive emotions every time you look at them and brighten your day.

As an added bonus, it’s also worth looking for anything negative in your environment that you can start to remove. For example, those news alerts on your phone or that clutter you keep meaning to tidy up. The less things you have that create a negative feeling or thought, the more space you’ll have for the positive ones.

Happiness Tip #3

Do Something Kind for Someone

This tip not only increases your happiness, but also the happiness of others too. So, why not send a “thinking about you, thank you or well done” message to someone you know?

Or, alternaitvely, buy coffee, lunch or flowers for a friend. Or donate your spare change to charity. Because research shows that spending money on others boosts our happiness just as much, if not more, than when we only spend it on ourselves.

How to Increase Happiness Permanently

All 3 of these happiness boosters are proven to give you an increased feeling of positivity in the moment AND permanently increase your happiness level over time if repeated often. How cool is that?

It’s the little things in life that make the biggest difference — don’t you think? So, which of these happiness boosters will you try today to increase your happiness both now and in your future?

What Makes You Happy?

I share more tips like these in my Free Newsletter every Wednesday — where you’ll learn how to be a little bit happier and healthier every single week. Get instant access when you enter your name and email below.

And, if you sign up today, you’ll get instant access to a Free Values Worksheet to help you understand what makes you truly happy — so you can do more of it.

More Ways to Increase Your Happiness

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And remember, you deserve to be happy both now and in your future.

With love,

Becky x