In addition to helping you deal with everyday stress, maintain positive personal relationships, and accomplish your professional goals, excellent mental health also helps you feel confident in yourself, have constructive cognitive processes, and control your emotions. Our everyday routines can significantly affect our mental health, even if we may not be aware of it.

Over the course of more than 30 years, Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, an experimental social psychologist and professor of psychology located in the US, has been researching happiness. Her assessment? Happiness is frequently a matter of choice. Thus, happiness is a choice we have.

In the chapter headed “The How, Why, What, When, and Who of Happiness,” she and researcher Dr. Kristin Layous summarize their results from the book Positive Emotion: Integrating the Light Sides and Dark Sides (2014). They claim that, if we make an effort, adopting the attitudes and behaviors of inherently cheerful individuals may enhance our own happiness. Let’s find out the genuine explanation about what happiness is.

1. A Pattern For Happiness

Ikbal Habib, an adult and child clinical psychologist at Maudsley Health in Abu Dhabi, believes that “because happiness is mostly a subjective concept, it is difficult to define and evaluate. Depending on what each individual considers to be essential, it might differ from person to person.”

2. It’s how we look at life

People who are frequently seen grinning are not immune to issues that affect everyone. So, what’s the key to their pleasure, then? They just seem to be better at accepting and letting go, of it seems.

3. It’s doing the things we like

It seems that individuals are happy when they are involved in an activity and feel challenged by it as well. Consider a pastime that you enjoy, for example. You do it because you like the activity so much that time flies while you’re in the zone.

4. It’s looking after yourself

The craze around TLC is entirely justified. If you’ve lately tried to improve your lifestyle by going on a daily 30-minute walk or doing yoga after waking up, you know that it’s easier said than done.

Source: gulf news