# HowtoHappie Main Points
## Meditation
What do Oprah Winfrey, Kobe Bryant, Arianna Huffington, Jennifer Aniston, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Miranda Kerr, Katy Perry, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Angelina Jolie, Sting, Lebron James, Hugh Jackman, and Madonna have in common?

They are ultra-successful.

And… they meditate.

Tim Ferriss interviewed more than 200 highly successful people on his podcast. In his book, Tools of Titans, he explains that the one routine – yes, one! – billionaires, icons, and world-class performers have in common is meditation.

## Custom 30 Day Challenge
### Day 1
**Reflect on what happiness means to you.**
Throughout our lives we are made to think that happiness comes at a later point. Once we are successful or once we achieve a certain achievement. Only you can define happiness. Psychologists and philosophers have tried to answer it for themselves:
* Martin Seligman believed it was a mixture of pleasure, engagement and meaning to your life.
* Aristotle defined it as the ability to flourish as a human
* Shawn Anchor believes it is the joy we feel striving for our potential
* Spiritual people sometimes define it as being healthy in body and mind
* Challenging yourself and overcoming your fears

Again only you can decide for yourself. It may be similar to the points above, but it should be unique in some way.

### Day 2
**Stop postponing happiness.**
Probably the biggest myth of our time is that happiness comes only after we are successful. People attempt to slave away at work every day, miserable with their life, in hopes that one day when they are more successful they can be happy.

Modern research has shown the exact opposite. Happiness comes first and will guide you to success.
As Shawn Anchor says, _“People who put their heads down and wait for work to bring eventual happiness put themselves at a huge disadvantage, while those who capitalize on positivity every chance they get come out ahead.”_

This is because positive emotions create a huge release of dopamine and serotonin chemicals in our brain (the happy chemicals). These not only make us feel good, but they also turn on the learning centers of our brain. This can help organize information, keep the information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on.

This even trickles down to day to day life with sayings like I'll be happy once I:
* Lose a few pounds
* Finish this project
* Move out of this state
* Get that promotion

Avoid phrases like
* If only
* As soon as

Deeply think about the ways you might be blocking yourself from a fuller, happier life.

### Day 3
**Stop with the stressful overthinking.**
Overwhelming research shows that overthinking is terrible for you. If you are someone who is plagued by compounding, constant negative thoughts, you are unlikely to become happier before you break that habit.

How do you get rid of it?
1. Identify the things that stress you out the most and write down the emotions associated with them. Write down why you are scared of that thing and stop the overthinking. Putting your ruminations into words helps organize them, make sense of them, and discover a pattern you weren't aware of before.
2. Create healthy distractions. Instead of letting one thought escalate into hours of overthinking, redirect your attention somewhere else. Exercise, watch a youtube video you enjoy, read a fiction novel that gets you caught up in the story. Anything that fully absorbs your attention will do the trick.

### Day 4
**Express Gratitude**
We constantly look out for the negatives in the world, most of the time unconsciously. This comes with a great cost. It undermines our creativity, raises stress, and lowers motivation/ability to accomplish goals.

We start to develop inattentional blindness- our inability to see what is right in front of us if we are not directly focusing on it. Since we are often focusing on the negatives, what we wanted all along appears and we miss it.

Giant Gorilla Example.

Luck in scientific terms, doesn't even exist. People who consider themselves lucky are more likely to recognize clues and hints that unlucky people do not. For example, in a study, a group of people were asked to count the number of words on a newspaper page. An annoyingly tedious task. The catch is that there was a box on one of the page that said "Stop counting. The number of words is 3,452 or whatever the number" The people who considered themselves lucky, found the box much more often than people who didn't consider themselves lucky.

The easiest way to start doing this immediately is to make a daily journal of three good things that has happened to you or that you are grateful for. When you do this, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours and think of positives. Continuously doing this, trains your brain to continue to do it in the future.

Be grateful of your circumstances. Be grateful of your past, and the fact that you have a future that can be whatever you want it to be. Be grateful you live in the modern world where there are amazing technologies. No matter what happens today you have the opportunity to make tomorrow better.

### Day 5
**Focus on the science.**

Give your body the things it needs to be happy. Get good sleep, eat a well balanced diet, and hug people (yes hug people more. Contact releases endorphins which can benefit your mood). Just do things that generally increase the feel good hormones on a daily basis.

### Day 6
**Have A Project**
Goals give you meaning, a sense of purpose, a feeling of control, and a positive outlook on life. They get us fired up and out of bed in the morning. They put us into that high-performance state of enthusiasm, positivity, and motivation.

If you love what you do and your project is your work, great! Focus on how you can have fun with it each and every day. If not, reserve some extra time to accomplish something else. For me, it's making youtube videos. I love being able to help people and express myself in videography at the same time. Think about what you could do as a side project that you can identify as your sense of purpose.

### Day 7 (end of week 1)
**Practice being mindful/meditation**

You are a walrus and have been flowing along with this very big, endless river with large currents. Since you’ve been there all your life, you don’t know what it is like outside the river.

Now, you grab a rock with your flippers and cling onto it.

Suddenly, you feel the weight of the river pushing against you. The current suddenly appears and you are shocked - “How is it that I never realized that I was being dragged along in a current?”

“Grabbing onto the rock” is akin to being mindful. “River pushing against you” refers to the myriads of distractions that surface when you try to stabilize the mind. The reason why you never realized that this current was there was because you were flowing along with it all along.

Every day focus on the moment at hand. Don't let other stresses flow into your brain and get you stressed or distracted. Being present is an amazing step in happiness. It releases the bound up energy in all of us. Open up tiny pockets of stillness throughout your life. Realize how you feel in the moment and let all the stress go

> The most important thing is to keep the most important thing, the most important thing. - Jim Kwik

Not only will being mindful boost your mood, but it will increase your productivity, and allow you to do more.

Bonus- take it a step further and try meditation. Sit down and tie yourself to one thought or idea. This can be focusing on your breath, or even better focusing on parts of the body.

-DBT mental body scan
### Day 8
**Kill Your ANTS**
Get some raid and kill the ants in your kitchen. They are too much of an eyesore. jk.
ANTS are automatic negative thoughts and they can destroy not only your happiness, but your potential.

Imagine if you had a stupid friend who you always believed. He told you that chickens in Africa are only purple and without thinking you went 'Really? Wow I didn't know that'. This is essentially like your own thoughts. You hear your own thoughts and often accept them as fact without question.

> If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. -Kwik
> He who who says he can and he who says he can t are both usually right. - Confucious

Don’t take your inner voices word for it. Take any belief you have and ask
1. Is it true? y/n. if no move to 3
2. Can you absolutely know that its true? y/n
3. How do you react? How do you feel? What happens if it is/was true?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

In this way we can step back and deal with our own problems at a level heading perspective, giving us clarity and dismissing limiting beliefs.

### Day 9
**Let Go**
Write down every last shred of what you want to let go of.

Examples: People you don’t like, arguing with reality, resentments about exes or what your parents did way back when, inhibitions about what you should or shouldn’t do, guilt about what you did, guild about what you didn’t do, stressing about things you have no control over, anger at things you can’t change, fear about your future, negative self talk, blame, the idea that you need to be perfect, the idea that you need to be happy all the time, being stubborn about the right way to be, all your opinions, money worries, constantly defending yourself, crippling fear of failure, attachment to end goals/achievements, comparing your life to other peoples, expectations, fear of being alone/abandoned, low self esteem, excuses, lying to yourself, being shy, not defending yourself.

### Day 10
**Invest in a social circle**

## Final Daily Challenge
### Day 1
#### Reflect on what happiness means to you.
##### **Time**: 5-10 mins
##### **Goal**: Have a clear understanding of what you need to focus on to achieve happiness in your life.

The first step? Define happiness. Only you can define happiness for yourself. Psychologists and philosophers have tried to answer it for themselves:

* Martin Seligman believed it was a mixture of pleasure, engagement and meaning to your life.
* Aristotle defined it as the ability to flourish as a human
* Shawn Anchor believes it is the joy we feel striving for our potential
* Spiritual people sometimes define it as being healthy in body and mind
* Challenging yourself and overcoming your fears

Again only you can decide for yourself. It may be similar to the points above, but it should be unique in some way.

##### Action Plan:
1. Write out your activities, involvements, hobbies, jobs, etc.
2. Think about which of these you associate with positive emotions. Use your gut. Your initial feeling when writing each is a tell tale sign.
3. Explore why those make you happy, therefore defining your own happiness.
4. Have a game plan to incorporate more of these activities into your life.

### Day 2
#### Contemplate what is blocking your happiness
##### **Time**: 5 mins
##### **Goal**: Stop blocking yourself from happiness so that you can use it to fuel your success.

Probably the biggest myth of our time is that happiness comes only after we are successful. People attempt to slave away at work every day, miserable with their life, in hopes that one day when they are more successful they can be happy.

Modern research has shown the exact opposite. Happiness comes first and will guide you to success.
As Shawn Anchor says, “People who put their heads down and wait for work to bring eventual happiness put themselves at a huge disadvantage, while those who capitalize on positivity every chance they get come out ahead.”

This is because positive emotions create a huge release of dopamine and serotonin chemicals in our brain (the happy chemicals). These not only make us feel good, but they also turn on the learning centers of our brain. This can help organize information, keep the information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on.

One of the main ways we put ourselves at a disadvantage and hold ourselves from happiness is with sayings like I'll be happy once I:
* Lose a few pounds
* Finish this project
* Move out of this state
* Get that promotion

##### Action Plan
1. Deeply think about the ways you might be blocking yourself from a fuller, happier life. What negative sayings do you incorporate into your life?
2. Compare these statements with your definition of happiness from day 1.
3. Realize that sayings like these have no correlation to your happiness and strip away the power they have over your life.

### Day 4
#### Stop with the stressful overthinking
##### **Time**: 5-10 mins
##### **Goal**:

Overwhelming research shows that overthinking is terrible for you. If you are someone who is plagued by compounding, constant negative thoughts, you are unlikely to become happier before you break that habit.

How do you get rid of it?

1. Identify the things that stress you out the most and write down the emotions associated with them. Write down why you are scared of that thing and stop the overthinking. Putting your ruminations into words helps organize them, make sense of them, and discover a pattern you weren’t aware of before.
2. Create healthy distractions. Instead of letting one thought escalate into hours of overthinking, redirect your attention somewhere else. Exercise, watch a youtube video you enjoy, read a fiction novel that gets you caught up in the story. Anything that fully absorbs your attention will do the trick.

feadfea
1. Meditate, calm the mind
2. Practice mindfulness
3. remind yourself of the emotions behind what you d
4. Incorporate some form of starting in everything you do.

###### tags: `Happiness`