







The first way to create more happiness. This is by fixing the ratio Studies have found that about 80% of the thoughts that we have on a day-to-day basis are negative. This is bad because every time you have a negative thought it comes with a negative feeling. Take for example, the extremely common thought that a lot of us have "I'm not good enough". When you have this thought. What do you feel? Well, depending on who you are, it can make you feel angry, ashamed, guilty, depressed or even just sad. The point is when you have a negative thought like this it makes you feel bad. You're creating unhappiness in your life. On the other hand when you have a positive thought like 'people love me'. What does that do? They make you feel good, right? These type of thoughts do the opposite. They create happiness. Which is why if you want to be happy, you need to fix the ratio of the amount of bad thoughts you have every day to the amount of good thoughts you have every day. And there are two ways you can go about doing this.





1. Expressing Gratitude

The first is by building a habit of expressing gratitude. I have a journal that I write in every night. I write about a couple of things like, what i learned that day, any key events that occurred, what i want to accomplish the following day. But i always end my journal entries by writing down at least one thing that I'm grateful for in my life. For example, I've written things like i feel grateful for having a job that I truly enjoy or something like i feel grateful towards my dad for teaching me how to work hard from a very young age. And, by simply taking a minute or two to think about and write down one thing you feel fortunate to have, you're forcing your brain to have a good thought. You're training your brain to look for the good in life. And over time, you'll actually catch yourself having more and more positive thoughts randomly throughout the day.





2. Control Your Overthinking

The second way you can fix the ratio is by learning to control your overthinking.

I have written a full article on ' How to stop overthinking '. Make sure you check this also.

See we often fall into spirals and negativity we start to think about an event that occurred to us and we make negative assumptions based off of these events. For example, let's say you got rejected by someone in the past. You might replay that event over and over again in your head and think to yourself 'man why I'd say that to her, she must think I'm a loser. No one's attracted to me. I'm never going to find love. And, it just gets worse and worse. When we fall into negative spirals like this we can easily spend 30 minutes to an hour just beating ourselves up creating a ton of unhappiness in our life. Which is why it's extremely important to be able to catch yourself early on in one of these spirals of negativity so that you can stop yourself from essentially torturing yourself. And the best way to do this is by practicing 'meditation'. Meditation is kind of like lifting weights and working out but with your mind. The more you meditate the stronger your ability to control your thoughts will be. You'll be able to catch yourself falling into a negative spiral and insert a positive thought manually to stop yourself from creating more unhappiness. Using the example from before, if you catch yourself in a negative spiral brooding over a past rejection, you can simply think to yourself, you know getting rejected was actually a good thing. The more times i put myself out there, the better I will get at talking to girls. Which makes the entire situation seemed like a good one and that stops the negative spiral. When you combine journaling with meditation, you will start to see a slight change in your ratio in just a couple of weeks and there doesn't need to be a huge difference for you to notice a shift in your day-to-day levels of happiness. A day where you spend only 70% of the time thinking negative thoughts will feel vastly different from a day where you spent 80% of the time thinking negative thoughts.





The next way we can create more happiness in our lives is by building and maintaining social bonds. The Amazon Explorer Yossi Ghinsberg spent weeks in the Amazon jungle all by himself. After the expedition reporters asked him what he thought the hardest part of his adventure was? what caused him the most suffering? And he replied by saying that it was not the millions of mosquitoes that feed off of you day and night or the unforgiving weather where even the bumpins with dangerous animals and natives. It was the loneliness that he felt after just a couple weeks. He had to create imaginary friends in order to keep himself company, just so that he wouldn't go insane. See almost all human beings have a built-in need for social bonds. It's in our DNA. You actually have to have them or else your brain will shrink and there's a pretty good chance that you'll develop some form of mental illness. But other than that building and maintaining social bonds allows you to create more happiness in your life in two ways. Firstly when you have conversations with people, it's a form of play. You can exchange information, you can solve problems together or you can tease and make jokes with each other. All of which are fulfilling and pleasurable for us human beings. These activities create happiness within us. The second reason why you need to build and maintain social bonds, is that it helps you deal with sources of unhappiness. Life is tough. We all eventually face things like loss of a loved one, severe injuries or just plain old misfortune. It's inevitable. And these things can cause us to fall into deep negative spirals that are often very hard to get out of by ourselves. But when you have strong social bonds, you essentially have a way to share and vent out the stress, the guilt and the other negative emotions that often come with these unfortunate events. This dramatically decreases the amount of suffering that these events can cause because it no longer feels like you're facing them by yourself.





So, how do we go about building and maintaining social bonds? Well, one of the most effective ways of doing this is by simply building a habit of reaching out to at least one person every day. It can be an old friend that you haven't talked to in a while, It can be a stranger who happened to sit next to you on your commute to work, It can even be some nice old man on a park bench who's feeding the pigeons. It doesn't matter, because by simply putting yourself out there and sparking a conversation you will create a bond with another human being which will make you happier. This will also over time improve your social skills allowing you to build even stronger bonds with other people.





Now, let's move on to the third and final way of happiness, which by the way is my favorite method. As you've probably noticed your ability to create more happiness ultimately depends on your ability to build new habits. Building a habit of journaling or a habit of meditation or even habit of reaching out to someone every day. The truth of the matter is, the only way you will actually see any change, any progress in your life is if you manage to build and stick to a habit. You can read all the books, read all the articles, watch all the videos and take all the courses as you want, if you don't actually build a habit and stick to it your life isn't going to change at all. All right, let's talk about the third and final way you can create happiness in your life. I call it becoming one with the muse. Well, that sounds so mystical. What exactly are you talking about Anything From Anywhere? Well, there are a ton of different names for this but the one that you're probably most familiar with already, is what's called entering a flow state. This is when you're engaged in an activity with a hundred percent of your focus every action, every movement and thought flows out of you effortlessly. You don't have to think, your body just does. Time flies by and everything you do feels amazing.









Reason I call it becoming one of the muse is because when you enter this state. It almost feels like you're not just you anymore. It feels like a sort of mystical energy is possessing your body, giving you all these amazing ideas. Now, this is just a fun way. I like to think of it as it makes the whole experience much more enjoyable for me. If it's not your cup of tea, you can always just think of it as the flow state. Studies have actually found that when we are in the flow state, when we are one of the muse, our brains flood our system with large quantities of dopamine endorphins and serotonin. These are all extremely pleasurable neurotransmitters. They are the same ones that hardcore drugs like cocaine and ecstasy manipulate in order to make you feel really really good. So, in a sense becoming one with the muse is like getting quote-unquote high off of life. This is a way for you to feel extremely good and happy without having to take a huge toll on your body like most hardcore drugs would. And this is why i consider this to be the most powerful way of creating happiness in your life. Because whenever you're feeling down you can simply get high off of life itself. So, how exactly does one answer to flow state more often. Well, it's quite simple. You probably already have a couple of things that you enjoy doing. It can be any hobby, any sort of work or skill so long as it allows you to be creative in some way and you just have to make a habit of spending some time every single day playing around with this activity that you enjoy. For example, my favorite way of going about this is by dancing. I've been dancing for more than half my life doing about 30 minutes sometimes more sometimes less but almost every day. The more often you become one with the muse the more you will find yourself entering this state of mind while doing other activities in your life. You'll notice slight changes in your personality. You'll become more playful, more creative and enjoy small simple things a lot more. And, what's great about spending time in the state of mind, is that over time you actually get really good at whatever activity it is that you like. If you like drawing and you play around with it for just 30 minutes a day. Over the course of a couple of years, you will actually get so good that you could potentially make a living off of it. It becomes a skill that other people will be impressed by for the rest of your life.





So look, if you want to create more happiness in your life. All you have to do is fix your ratio. Create more social bonds and spend more time becoming one with the muse. Besides that guys stay tuned.