Downstairs by Wolfgang Staudt

From the Reader’s Digest–

“Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Penguin Press, 2008) has researched the science of happiness for years. Here are her tips to help you cope with a bad economy, and increase your bursts of happiness throughout the day.

1.  Avoid Overthinking

2.  Practice Acts of Kindness

3.  Focus on Your Relationships

4.  Pick a Goal

5.  Take Care of Your Body

From Positive Self Development: 10 Tips for Practicing Positive Psychology includes a report from Harvard Medical College and suggests the following tips to work more happiness and positive feelings in your life.

1.  Forget multitasking—do one thing well at a time

2. Celebrate—don’t rush on to the next thing

3.  Slow down—enjoy your daily life

4.  Simplify your life—begin by decluttering your environment

5.  Listen to relaxing music

Selena at Blissfully You suggests that in order to be happy right now, we: (1) get nuts (to eat), (2) go, go, go (raise your heart rate), and (3) get together (with the person who cheers you up the most).

Keep a Good Things Notebook on Your Desk is a great suggestion. In another post I wrote how I had to make a cardstock bright cut-out of the things that make me happy. I called it my Good Feelings Action List.

Finally, a reprint of a quotation from Rousseau’s autobiography, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, as included in a post by Kathy Kattenburg entitiled “What Is Happiness?” that she wrote for The Moderate Voice.

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”