The 5 Daily Rituals That Will Make You Happy
You know what percentage of people are really happy? Not "oh, life is pretty good", I mean people who are flourishing. They feel their lives are fulfilling, meaningful and brimming with potential. 17. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, Less than one in five. And the question that follows is, of course how do I become one of those people?, I've been accumulating the research on happiness for a while. Good news is there's a lot of it. Bad news is who can remember to do all that stuff?, Well, one expert finally put it together into a simple 5-part formula. Christine Carter is a sociologist at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center which studies the psychology and neuroscience of well-being. She looked at the research and exhaustively compiled it into her book, The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work. So what's this formula to find your "sweet spot" of happiness  without completely overhauling your life?, Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, Okay, but what do we actually need to do?, Don't worry it's pretty easy. Let's break it down, , Most of what we do all day is "instrumental." What's that mean? It gets something done. It's practical. It achieves a goal. But these days we seem to be doing more and more that's instrumental and a lot less that's just fun. We forget to play. Is that so bad?, Actually, you have no idea how bad it is. Noted psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tried an experiment he told people to just do instrumental activities all day long. No fun allowed, literally. The old saying is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." It's more accurate to say, "All work and no play gives Jack a clinical anxiety disorder in under 48 hours." Seriously. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, After 2 days he ended the experiment because of the extreme negative effects it was having on the test subjects. So by trying to be so productive and get so much done you're probably stressing yourself out. What to do?, Schedule a little bit of fun every 90 minutes or so. Nothing productive allowed. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, You can actually get more done sometimes by being a bit of a slacker. Vacations make you more productive. By working 60 hour weeks you can get a lot done. But when you work that hard for too long, your productivity drops off. After 2 months of 60 hours a week you'll actually accomplish less than if you'd only been working 40 hours a week. Via Scarcity Why Having Too Little Means So Much, For more on how to be happier and more successful, click here., You might be worried that taking breaks will mean you still get less done. But we've got a solution for that. , You spend 40 of the day on autopilot, engaging in habits, not actual decisions. Via The Power of Habit Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, And we get more done when we're on autopilot, actually. Not having to make decisions uses less willpower. So start building better habits. You don't "decide" to brush your teeth, it's just something you do and it's not a struggle. With more habits like this you can get a lot more done in less time with little stress. At first, just try little habits. Connect them to things that are already part of your routine. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, Another easy way to break in a new good habit is to use what happiness expert Shawn Achor calls the "20 second rule.", Anything you want to accomplish, find a way to make it 20 seconds easier to get started on like putting your workout clothes next to the bed. Anything you want to stop doing, make it 20 seconds harder to start hide the candy where it's hard to reach. From my interview with Shawn, For more on how to build good habits, click here., You're having more fun and becoming more efficient by turning routine tasks into habits. Great. What else will bring you more happiness. The answer is "less.", , Do less. Really, you can. Christine puts it pretty simply, We spend so much time reacting rather than following through with our goals. Whenever I tell people they need to do less the reaction is pretty much like I told them to grow wings and fly "That's impossible!", But then I ask them 4 questions about a task and very, very rarely can they honestly answer "yes" to each one, Like I said, very few tasks get a "yes" for all four. And that means you can either ignore it, delegate it, do it quickly or make it one of tomorrow's top five. You can do less. And less means less stress and more time for fun. For more on achieving work-life balance without driving yourself crazy, click here., So that means less on your plate. So what should you fill your plate with?, , Christine pulls a quote I love from the wonderful book Triumphs of Experience, If you ask psychology researchers, economists, insurance adjusters and old people they will all agree on the single most important key to happinessrelationships. That's not hard to believe. What is surprising is just how far that truth extends. Michael Norton and Elizabeth Dunn authors of the book Happy Money The Science of Happier Spending showed that merely talking to the barista at Starbucks makes us happier. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, So you can do that if you're a daily Starbucks drinker but just like with networking, the easiest way to work on relationships is to first strengthen the ones you already have. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, You don't need to buy gifts or go out of your way. Just give your attention. Listen. Ask about the good things that have happened to them lately and be happy for them. It's that simple. For more on how to get people to like you, click here., Okay, last one coming up. And it's a bit ironic. Want life to happier? Then make it a little harder, , Many of us come home from work and think, "I just want to sit down and do nothing.", And that's understandable if you're overworked and burned out. But "doing nothing" is really not what will make you happier. Sitting on the couch watching TV does not make your life better, Research shows we're generally not inclined to do what makes us happiest, actually. We do what's easy. Via The Happiness Advantage The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, One of the things research has consistently shown makes us happy is striving. Making progress in things we find meaningful is incredibly motivating. Engaging in things you're good at has been shown to powerfully boost happiness. People who deliberately exercised their "signature strengths" on a daily basis became significantly happier for months. Via The Happiness Advantage The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, But how do you prevent this from becoming yet another stressful chore?, This isn't your boss forcing you to do something. This is you choosing to push yourself so you get better. Navy SEALs treat problems like a game. Similarly, Shawn Achor says to see obstacles as a challenge, not a threat. And Christine agrees. Via The Sweet Spot How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, For more on how to get better at anything, click here., Let's tie it all together into something simple that we can use. , Here's Christine's five step formula, One of the secrets of the happiest people isn't merely that their brains are wired that way, but they also engage in activities on a daily basis that keep them flourishing. Try the above five things on a daily basis for a few weeks and see if they can make you happy. As Aristotle said, Join over 161,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts, New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful, The 8 Things The Happiest People Do Every Day, How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done  5 Expert Tips