Happiness Hacks

It's been a couple of deflating weeks.  Between work, home, and general life stress, I had a breakdown.  I can see how easy it would be fore someone to become and alcoholic.  Now I"m not even close to that, but there were quite a few times I could have really used a drink.

What I'm finding is really hard for me is; who do I vent to?  I'm a pretty positive person.  I let a lot of things just roll off my back or I keep them to myself because I don't want my negativity to effect others.  But there are those times where you just need to vent and I'm not sure who or where I can go to.  This week I kept everything in and I crashed.  I was angry, depressed, upset of things out of my control.  Every little thing that came after this one incident was bigger than it should have been and I checked out.

My happiness hack came from people; customers, merchants, co-workers, etc.  I feel as though some people just make life difficult for themselves and feel that everyone should have as much trouble with life as they do so they create drama.  Why are we unpleasant to people?  Why do we create so much unneeded drama?  Why do we like to share the drama?

Happiness is this thing that everyone searches for and for some it's very elusive.  When really we all create our own happiness.  We choose how things effect us and a lot of "the drama" is created by our own insecurities. 

Act the way I want to feel.  Although we presume that we act because of the way we feel, in fact we often feel because of the way we act.  For example, studies show that even an artificially induced smile brings about happier emotions, and one experiment suggested that people who use botox are less prone to anger, because they can't make angry faces.  The philosopher and psychologist William James explained "Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together, and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not."  Advice from every quarter, ancient and contemporary, backs up the observation that to change our feelings, we should change our actions." - The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin