“The newlywed wife said to her husband when he returned from work, “I have great news for you. Pretty soon, we’re going to be three in this house instead of two.”

He was glowing of happiness and kissing his wife when she said, “I’m glad that you feel this way since tomorrow morning, my mother moves in with us.”

/end joke

🙂 Happiness is such a wonderful feeling. Out of a sudden, you feel energetic and excited as if nothing else matters in the world. You jump, you cry and you smile. It really is amazing.

However, just like most of other feelings, happiness will deteriorate with time. And the quest to maintain and find happiness is really a challenging task even for the most optimistic person.

Any tricks that you use to find happiness? These are a few of mine.

1) Outsource doing things that you hate

Let say you dislike doing laundry but your spouse is at neutral with that task (means no inclination to both liking and disliking), why not negotiate the task. She will do the laundry while you cook dinner. Provided that you love cooking, both of you will be relatively happier each day.

2) Create a Survivor type happiness booth

Get an A4 paper, and write down all the emotion you can remember. Cut every words and put it into a box. Put the box in front of a mirror and every morning, allocate some time to be in front of the mirror and find the word happiness from the box. Show the word to the mirror and say it out loud why you choose to be happy today.

It can be exactly the same thing everyday, but subconcioiously this will help a lot in your quest to finding happiness everyday.

Whenever you are feeling “not happy”, you will immediately remember that ritual you do every morning, and you will know that that is the chance for you to choose happiness instead of other emotion. It is going to be easier to be happy if we have made that choice everyday conciously. Try it and tell me how it goes.

3) Set up secret journal of happiness

I’m not sure about you, but I always feel happier when I’m thinking about my past happy moments, like the first day I received the news that I’m going to be a father, or the day my daughter was born (Hm weird, it seems like a lot of my happiness recently comes from my daughter).

If you are just like me, I would encourage you to keep a secret journal of happiness. It can be a microsoft word file (password protected of course) with a few line to remind us of the event that make us happy.

Happy moments are like treasure. Treat it like one.

4) Do _____ just for fun

If you think about it, we never really do stuff just for the fun of it. I’m not talking about the things we like to do like football, or blogging etc. These activities usually have other benefits to us that we don’t really have fun while doing it.

Try to do one random things just for the fun of it. Go dancing under the rain, or go camera crazy at the zoo (Try to get every possible pictures you can), or sing a song at a friend’s wedding (make sure you don’t know a single word of that song)

You will be laughed at, that for sure, but you will also have a good laugh after that. And nothing brings out happiness better than a good laugh.

– I wonder –
Any secret tricks that will sure make you happy?

———– Personal Note ————-
A quick flash back to my Journal of Happiness,

Photo Credit – Jaja 1986