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Some of these secrets are summarized below.
1. Your life has purpose and meaning. Without a clearly defined purpose, seven in ten individuals feel unsettled about their lives; with a purpose seven in ten feel satisfied.
2. Use a strategy for happiness. The average unhappy person spends more than twice as much time thinking about unpleasant events in their lives, while happy people tend to seek and rely upon information that brightens their personal outlook.
3. You don't have to win every time. Competitiveness can preclude life satisfaction; ultra-competitive people rate their successes with lower marks than some people rate their failures.
4. Your goals should be aligned with one another. Life satisfaction is associated with consistency of life goals, if your goals conflict with one another your life may not work. Goals related to career, education, family and geography add up together to be about 80% of satisfaction.
5. Choose your comparisons wisely. Many of our feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction have their roots in how we compare ourselves to others. Compare yourself with those examples that are meaningful but that make you feel comfortable with who you are and what you have.
6. Cultivate relationships. Close relationships are the most meaningful factors in happiness. You are four times more likely to feel good about yourself if you are close to other people than if you do not feel close to anyone.
7. Turn off the TV. Television is the creamy filling that distracts us from the substance of our lives. Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions while reducing personal contentment by about 5% for each hour we watch.
8. Accept yourself unconditionally. People who are happy with themselves take defeat and explain it away by treating it as an isolated incident. People who are unhappy take defeat and enlarge it, making it stand for who they are.
9. Remember where you came from. Celebrating your ethnicity gives you a sense of place, a sense of history. Greater ethnic identity is associated with 10% greater life satisfaction.
10. The quality of your sleep may be related to your level of happiness. Better sleepers are 6% more satisfied with their lives than average sleepers, and 25% more satisfied than poor sleepers.
11. Friendship beats money. The primary components of happiness are not related to money, rather to the number of friends, closeness of friends, closeness of family, and relationships with co-workers and neighbors.
12. Have realistic expectations. The congruence of a person's goals with their resources strongly correlates with happiness. The more realistic and attainable a person's goals are, the more likely they are to feel good about themselves.
13. Be open to new ideas. Never stop learning and adapting. The world is always changing. Those who are resistant to change, on the other hand, are less than one third as likely to feel happy.
14. Share with others how important they are to you. Relationships are built on mutual appreciation. There is no better way to show that appreciation than to tell someone.
15. If you are not sure, guess positively. Unhappy people take a situation in which they are not sure and come to a negative conclusion. Happy people and unhappy people explain the world differently. When an unhappy person must interpret the world, eight in ten times he or she will see the negative in an event. Conversely a happy person will see the positive eight out of ten times.
16. Believe in yourself. If you don't believe in yourself, you will not be able to function. A solid belief in one's abilities increases life satisfaction by about 30%.
17. Don't believe in yourself too much. Believing in yourself means thinking you are a capable person, not that you never make a mistake. We can also always learn something from others.
18. Don't face your problems alone. Problems can appear to be unsolvable. When we feel alone, problems fester. By sharing we can get perspective and find solutions.
19. Age is not to be feared. Older people are as happy as younger people. Age is unrelated to happiness.
20. Develop a household routine. Feeling overwhelmed with chores and responsibilities can reduce personal satisfaction. Studies show an increase of satisfaction by about 5% if a personal routine is established.
21. Don't be overprotective. Spending time worrying and trying to prevent risk will keep us worrying all the time. Being over protective creates high levels of stress and less life satisfaction.
22. Pay attention, you may already have what you want. We often forget to sit down and think about where we started and where we are now. The human tendency is to want more. A better approach is to remember where you started and appreciate how much you have accomplished.
23. Don't let your spiritual beliefs fade. Regardless of the spiritual beliefs people affiliate themselves with, it is correlated to a deeper level of satisfaction in life than those who have no affiliation.
24. Do what you say you are going to do. Stay committed. It is a greater commitment to following through on agreed upon changes that contributes to the success of relationships and the 23% greater happiness of the individuals involved.
25. Don't be aggressive with your friends and family. Even if you are right, there is nothing to be gained from letting yourself become adversarial with loved ones. Prevalent criticism within relationships reduces happiness up to one-third.
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