While we can't change our nature, we can train our brains to be more positive. This doesn't mean putting on a smiley face and whistling a happy tune no matter what's going on. You don't have to ignore reality or pretend things are wonderful even when they're not. But just as dwelling on negative things fuels unhappiness (and plays a big role in depression and anxiety), choosing to notice, appreciate, and anticipate goodness is a powerful happiness booster.
Write a letter of gratitude. Think of someone who did something that changed your life for the better who you never properly thanked. Write a thoughtful letter of gratitude expressing what the person did, how it affected you, and what it still means to you. Then deliver the letter. Positive psychology expert Martin Seligman recommends reading the letter in person for the most dramatic increase in happiness.
Happiness Just A Change Of Perspective
A little change in perspective can bring a transformative change in our lives. Viewing every situation in a new light can open new opportunities as unexpected miracles are hidden in every moment. Viewing every situation in a positive light can help you to deal with any situation in a better way. No matter how harsh a situation is, you can still drive good outcomes out of it by not losing hope.
When it comes to achieving our life goals, the transformative power of perspective can bring you more abundance. To change our life situation, we must bring positive change in our perspective as a positive change in perspective is the key to lead a happy life. Positivity can uplift your life to a new height and encourage you to make positive changes in life.
The next thing that one should do to attain a positive perspective in life is by surrounding yourself with people having an optimistic outlook towards life. Optimistic people spread happiness and engage in an uplifting environment. For introducing positivity in life, you should surround yourself with positive people.
Embracing positive perspective can make you feel abundant in every aspect of your life. By bringing change in your perspective, you can experience how limitless the possibilities are in life. Perspective has a transformative power with which you change your life entirely.
The research, appearing online August 12 in Psychological Review, found that major life events, such as divorce, career changes and personal tragedies, linked to higher richness, but not meaning or happiness.
When forced to choose just one path to a good life, most people, with some variability by country, opt for a life high in happiness, with meaning coming in second. Yet a sizable minority choose psychological richness.
If you want to change your life, you need to change the way you look at it. You need to find a new perspective. This might mean changing your attitude, your outlook, or your mindset. It might mean looking at things from a different angle or seeing the silver lining in every cloud.
The title of this chapter is intentionally ambiguous, designed to document not just the year-to-year changes in happiness, but also to consider how happiness has been affected by changes in the quality of government. After our review of how world happiness has been changing since the start of the Gallup World Poll, we turn to present our rankings and analysis of the 2016-2018 average data for our three measures of subjective well-being plus the six main variables we use to explain their international differences. See Technical Box 1 for the precise definitions of all nine variables.
The four panels of Figure 2.2 show the evolution of life evaluations in ten global regions, divided into four continental groupings.[4] In each case the averages are adjusted for sampling and population weights. The first panel has three lines, one each for Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). All three groups of countries show average life evaluations that fell in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crash, with the falls being greatest in Western Europe, then in the CIS, with only a slight drop in Central and Eastern Europe. The post-crash happiness recovery started first in the CIS, then in Central and Eastern Europe, while in Western Europe average life evaluations only started recovering in 2015. CIS evaluations rose almost to the level of those in Central and Eastern Europe by 2014, but have since fallen, while those in Central and Eastern Europe have continued to rise, parallelling the post-2015 rise in Western Europe. The overall pattern is one of happiness convergence among the three parts of Europe, but with a recent large gap opening up between Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS.
In this section we focus our attention on changes in the distribution of happiness. There are at least two reasons for us to do this. First, it is important to consider not just average happiness in a community or country, but also how it is distributed. Second, it is done to encourage those interested in inequality to consider happiness inequality as a useful umbrella measure. Most studies of inequality have focused on inequality in the distribution of income and wealth,[5] while in Chapter 2 of World Happiness Report 2016 Update we argued that just as income is too limited an indicator for the overall quality of life, income inequality is too limited a measure of overall inequality.[6] For example, inequalities in the distribution of health[7] have effects on life satisfaction above and beyond those flowing through their effects on income. We and others have found that the effects of happiness equality are often larger and more systematic than those of income inequality. For example, social trust, often found to be lower where income inequality is greater, is even more closely connected to the inequality of subjective well-being.[8]
We now turn to our country-by-country ranking of changes in life evaluations. In the two previous reports, we concentrated on looking at recent changes in life evaluations. This year we take advantage of the ever-growing length of the Gallup sample to compare life evaluations over a longer span, averaging ten years, from 2005-2008 to 2016-2018. In Figure 2.8 we show the changes in happiness levels for all 132 countries that have sufficient numbers of observations for both 2005-2008 and 2016-2018.
Figure 42 and Table 31 in Statistical Appendix 1 show the population-weighted actual and predicted changes in happiness for the 10 regions of the world from 2005-2008 to 2016-2018. The correlation between the actual and predicted changes is only 0.14, and with actual changes being less favorable than predicted. Only in Central and Eastern Europe, where life evaluations were up by 0.6 points on the 0 to 10 scale, was there an actual increase exceeding what was predicted. South Asia had the largest drop in actual life evaluations (more than 0.8 points on the 0 to 10 scale) while it was predicted to have a substantial increase. Since these regional averages are weighted by national populations, the South Asian total is heavily influenced by the Indian decline of more than 1.1 points. Sub-Saharan Africa was predicted to have a substantial gain, while the actual increase was much smaller. Latin America was predicted to have a small gain, while it shows a population-weighted actual drop of the same size. The MENA region was predicted to be a gainer, and instead lost 0.52 points. The countries of Western Europe were predicted to have no change, but instead experienced a small reduction. For the remaining regions, the predicted and actual changes were in the same direction, with the substantial reductions in the United States (the largest country in the NANZ group) being larger than predicted. As Figure 42 and Table 31 show, changes in the six factors are not very successful in capturing the evolving patterns of life over what have been tumultuous times for many countries. Nine of the ten regions were predicted to have 2016-2018 life evaluations higher than in 2005-2008, but only half of them did so. In general, the ranking of regional predicted changes matched the ranking of the actual changes, despite typical experience being less favorable than predicted. The notable exception is South Asia, which experienced the largest drop, contrary to predictions.
It is natural, as public and policy attention starts to shift from GDP to broader measures of progress, and especially to how people value their lives, that there should be growing policy interest in knowing how government institutions and actions influence happiness, and in whatever changes in policies might enable citizens to lead happier lives. 2ff7e9595c
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