Happiness - Choose your emotion

Cheer up! Pull yourself together! it may never happen!

There are many platitudes thrown around designed to immediately drag a person from a state of despair. But happiness is not that easy. People are not born happy, a cheery disposition does not come automatically. It is not a gift from God. You have to work at happiness, you have to be taught how to be happy.

The good news is that there are certain techniques you can use to trick the mind into thinking it is happy and I know them and they are not that difficult to learn. So Cheer up! You have already started to re-program your mind.

Choose your emotion

How are you feeling right now? Happy, sad, indifferent? You are feeling exactly what you have chosen to feel. I have a five year old son. He accidentally broke a cheap vase. There was just him and me in the room and before he showed any emotion he looked at me. He looked at me to tell him what to feel because he is only five and has not yet got a handle on his emotions. If I would have showed my angry face then the emotion he would have chosen would have been different than if I had started laughing. I chose his emotion for that event. Just as I chose his emotion for his first day at school. Just as I choose my emotion every day. So give it a go. Start small. Next time you are running late and stuck in traffic try not to feel what you usually feel. Choose to fell relaxed, happy, giddy. They are your emotions so you can choose which ones to use.

Just imagine

Imagine that you wake up to find your son’s bike stolen from your shed. How would you feel? Angry..of course. Some drugged up teenager must have broken into the shed looking for goods to sell for his next hit. The police will never find him, they won’t even bother looking. It is just so unfair. But what if the thief wasn’t a drugged up teenager. What if the thief were a middle aged single mother. Her home has been repossessed and she is living in a squat with her two children. She can not afford Christmas presents so she was forced into doing something which she will always be ashamed of. Or maybe a neighbour came home from work to find a note from his wife. She has gone into labour and has been taken to the maternity ward. The neighbour’s can not get his car started so he is forced to steel a bike to get to the hospital to witness the birth of his first child.

Before you next react to a situation give your imagination a test drive to see if you can’t change the way you feel. Remember, you may have no control over certain events, but you have full control on how you interpret those events.

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