Choosing Happier - How To Be Happy Despite Your Circumstances, History Or Genes: The Practical Happiness Series, #1

By Jem Friar

Would you like to be able to choose to be happier?

Did you know that scientists and researchers have discovered:

• Why some people are much happier than others?
• Happier people are more successful, resilient, creative, productive, kind and energetic, plus they have better health and relationships?
• We all have a happiness set point (a level of happiness that we keep returning to)?
• That this set point can be raised just by learning some simple habits and new ways of seeing the world?

This book busts the modern happiness myths that assert that we can find lasting happiness through having more money, buying more things, or being famous, successful or powerful.Instead, it provides science-backed, actionable, effective, and simple practices that can make being happier a whole lot easier whoever and wherever you presently are. Choosing Happier will teach you the skills, mind-sets and habits that will make it easy for you to live with more contentment and joy on a daily basis.

So read this book and learn the simple skills that will enable you to choose to be happier now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imaginal Publishing
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995681118

Book preview

CHOOSING HAPPIER

HOW TO BE HAPPY

despite your circumstances, history or genes

By Jem Friar

The Practical Happiness Series

(Book 1)

Copyright © 2017 Jem Friar

This book is copyrighted under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used without sole permission of the copyright holder except in use of a review.

Published by Imaginal Publishing

Cover design by: Predrag Čapo

E-book ISBN: 978-0-9956811-1-8

Print book ISBN: 978-0-9956811-2-5

FREE HAPPINESS TOOLKIT

To support you in your desire to be happier I have created several tools and resources for you to download. These include printable tracking sheets, reminder cards, pay it forwards cards, MP3 meditations, etc. They will make your journey to increasing happiness easier, more effective, fun and enjoyable and they are all FREE.

Don’t wait until you finish reading the book to get them, as they will be very helpful to have from the start. These tools will make it simpler for you to apply many of the practical exercises that are within this book and they are essential if you truly want to make a lasting change.

I will be creating even more useful aids to support you in living a more joy-full life and will inform you in the future as and when this toolbox increases! To access these tools and to get your discount code, just follow the link below.

Click here to get access to your Free Happiness Toolkit

https://www.choosing-happier.com/reader-bonuses/

AUDIOBOOK

Would you like to listen to Choosing Happier wherever you go? This book should soon be available as an audiobook (in fact, by the time that you read this it may already be). If you would like to get this book in its downloadable recorded form, please go to this page

https://www.choosing-happier.com/happiness-audiobook

It will be possible to buy the book on iTunes, Audible and Amazon shortly but you may be able to get it for free too. So please go to the link above first to find out.

PUBLISHER’S NOTES

Disclaimer

This publication is intended to provide helpful and informative material. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem or condition, nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. No action should be taken solely on the contents of this book. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare professional on any matters regarding your health and before adopting any suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it.

The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, from the use or application of any contents of this book.

Any and all product names referenced within this book are the trademarks of their respective owners. None of these owners have sponsored, authorized, endorsed, or approved this book.

(Should you practice any of the exercises presented in this book there is a very high likelihood that you may well end up more content in life and smiling a lot, which can be disconcerting for those who have not yet learnt how to be happier. In such cases, it is recommended that you encourage other people to read this book so that they can also raise their happiness levels and feel at ease with your new levels of joy.)

E-book Edition 2017

Manufactured in the United States of America

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the creation of a happier, kinder, more balanced and peaceful humanity on this beautiful planet.

"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present."

– Jim Rohn

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

– Mahatma Gandhi

The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it's all that matters.

— Audrey Hepburn

THE HAPPIER PLANET MISSION STATEMENT

To inspire and enable people to live more content and happy lives so that we all express and experience a greater level of kindness, care and consciousness. In this way, humanity as a whole will be able to thrive in an environmentally sustainable, benevolent, socially just and peaceful way on planet Earth.

My commitment is to help support positive change on this planet – one heart smile at a time.

– Jem Friar

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

Happiness doesn’t depend on who you are or what you have, it depends solely on what you think. – Dale Carnegie

There is a general belief held by many people that we cannot choose how happy we are, that our happiness is a result of our genes, our brain chemistry, our history, our family, our circumstances and even just down to our luck. I have written this book to show you that this is not true. In actual fact, anyone can change their levels of happiness by consciously changing their mindset and their habits. My aim is to help you to do just that.

There are three great motivators in life that impel us to act, think or speak in any given circumstance. These are:

1) Survival – to meet our needs for food, water, connection and shelter (and procreation when we take into account the biologically imperative of our species too.)

2) Pleasure or the experience of good feelings.

3) Pain or the avoidance of bad/uncomfortable feelings.

This book is focused on the second great motivator – increasing the amount of good or positive feelings that we experience. It is, after all, so often the driving force behind so many of the things that we do and pursue. Unfortunately, many of the ways that we attempt to find increased happiness are often ineffective or unsustainable. By this, I mean that we try to become happier by means that do not actually work, certainly not for an extended period. They may also be harmful to us and/or the people and the world around us. With this in mind, it would seem very sensible just to cut to the chase and discover what can effectively enable us to experience more positive emotions in an ongoing and sustainable way.

The skills that you will develop by reading this book will also have a very useful impact on the third great motivator – your desire to avoid pain! As you become increasingly positive and optimistic, you will be less likely to get caught in negative emotions, whilst being more resilient and able to move through challenges.

Fascinatingly, becoming happier makes us more effective at meeting our survival needs too. Happier people are more effective, productive and healthy, as well as better at developing good social connections and relationships!

Before I go any further, let me just clarify what I mean by happiness. The intention of this book is not to make you happy, happy, happy all of the time, as a way to avoid difficult emotions or to impress other people. This would be taking us into the realms of the potentially frivolous, self-serving and ungrounded pursuit of a form of happiness which is inauthentic, unnatural and potentially destructive! Rather, my intention is to enable you to experience more positive states on a day to day basis and be increasingly at ease and content. It is about developing the skills that will nourish you on a deep level and allow you to enjoy and appreciate life much more.

Nearly everyone wants to be happy but when it comes down to it most people are not very clear about how to actually become happier. Most people think that happiness will come in the future when something happens – a job, a raise, a relationship, some good fortune, etc. We constantly pursue various things in the hope that they will bring us happiness but these things do not guarantee that we will become happier at all and certainly not on a long-lasting basis.

If being happy were just about what we owned and earned, as we are so often told by the advertising industry, then we should be quite ecstatic at this point. However, in the past forty years, although the average income in the USA has tripled, happiness levels have hardly changed and are, in fact, slightly lower than they were. At the same time, depression has rapidly increased (1 in 2 people in the Western world are now likely to suffer from depression.) Why, when we have so much, are we not satisfied?

Our general levels of discontent seem to have increased recently for several reasons. Many of our beliefs about how to be happy are false. Our consumer society conditioning has had a massive negative impact by keeping us focused on where we are lacking. Unnatural modern-day ways of living in regards to having fewer real social connections, poor diet and exercise habits affect our capacity to be happy as well.

These are some of our contemporary challenges but we also have to look at an obstacle that humanity has always had to overcome when attempting to find contentment and joy; for we are confronted by a more biological hurdle – our brains have a natural negativity bias. This is an evolutionary trait that helped our ancestors to survive by enabling them to constantly be aware of potential threats and danger. However, in our modern relatively safe environment it is wise to learn how to consciously override this trait if you wish to maintain higher levels of optimism and positivity.

We will explore the main reasons why we are not as happy as we could be at the start of the book because understanding what you are up against will make moving beyond it all the easier. From there, I will guide you through many questions, practices, and exercises that will help you to perceive and act in life in much more positive ways and thus enable you to raise your basic happiness level.

Reading this book will help you to experience more positive emotions and be more resilient in the face of challenges in life – if you practice the suggested exercises and if you are willing to explore perceiving your world in different ways!

If that last sentence made you panic or shrink inside, don’t worry because any exercises that I suggest in this book are easy and quick to do. What is more, they are enjoyable and will inspire good feelings, which in turn makes them even more undemanding.

Increasing your positivity is a great goal to have in life yet it has been shown in countless research findings that being happier leads to various other brilliant consequences too because happiness is an enabler.

When people are happier they were found to:

- be more successful in their work

- be more productive

- be more creative

- have more energy

- have better health

- recover more quickly from illness

- enjoy life’s everyday experiences more

- be more resilient when faced with difficult situations

- have stronger friendships and better social networks

- have healthier and happier relationships.

So if any of these outcomes are at all appealing to you as well as the idea of being generally happier then this book will be extremely useful for you.

Beyond this, there are three things that you really need to know:

1) Happiness is a choice. This book will help you to really understand this fact and to inspire you to make that choice more easily.

2) Happiness is a skill and a practice that can be learned. With the right practices and mindset, it becomes straightforward to raise your daily happiness levels.

3) It is solely up to you to make choosing and being happy a major priority in your life – no one else will or can do it for you! Hoping that other people or things will make you happy is ineffective and disempowering.

The good news is that with the information in this book you can now make this choice much more easily and effectively. It will provide you with the tools, practices, habits, and ways of perceiving that will offer a lasting and practical answer to the how to be happy question.

With that clarified, I encourage you to dive straight into this exciting, inspiring and uplifting journey into the wisdom of happiness and joy. Read on, dear fellow traveler…

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

In many ways, I was lucky to grow up in London, England in the 1970s. Kids in our neighborhood played outside together in the streets and parks, television was good quality but limited (there were only three channels to choose from and even then, only at certain times of the day), our family felt stable and my mum was a great cook. My father, John, was a very humorous and kind man who definitely had a big influence on the development of my humor and perspective on life.

At school, my joking and mischievous pranks earned me good standing amongst my peers, whilst at the same time, no doubt caused regular frustration for my teachers. The habit of looking for the funny sides of situations also helped me, to a degree, to get through some of the tough experiences of growing up. Little did I know it, but I had already developed and obtained two of the benefits of being happy – better social connections and greater resilience.

My interest and fascination with our capacity to be happy (despite our circumstance) began in my twenties when I spent a decade traveling and working my way around the world. Something that I observed was that many people that I met who lived in basic or challenging conditions seemed to be much happier than many affluent people that I knew in the modern Western world. Having been conditioned to believe that happiness correlated to how secure your world was and how much you owned, this observation seemed to be a bizarre paradox.

I also noticed that some cultures and countries just seemed to be happier than others and this appeared to be based on their perception of life and reality i.e. their thoughts, beliefs and ways of living were more conducive to enjoying life and being happier in the moment.

I believe that if one person (or whole culture) can live in a certain way, then it is possible for others to learn to live in that way too. To that end, I often found myself attempting to understand and deconstruct the values and perspectives that were foundational for those happier cultures and people, with the intention of adopting them myself.

I am fascinated about anything to do with the conscious practice of self-development and personal growth. Our ability to learn new ways of being and thinking and our capacity to let go of habits, beliefs and thought patterns that do not serve our highest good in exchange for ones that do, are invaluable skills to learn that can deeply support our growth and evolution.

I made a commitment to continuously attempt to grow and learn many years ago and have done my best to keep it. For me, this has been by embracing the lessons in life that come my way, learning from others and gaining knowledge from experiences workshops, books and courses that were designed to inspire personal development and discovery. I have also explored my spiritual side through meditation, vision quests, and other inner initiatory experiences and retreats. They have all brought me to where I am in this moment and I am truly grateful for them. I am also happier because of it, as one of the keys to becoming happier is fulfilling our need to have a sense of ongoing self-growth and learning.

Embracing positive change has been important for me outside of my own journey too. In my work coaching or facilitating retreats and workshops, I am keen to help others find balance, grow and make positive shifts. I am enthusiastic about supporting such transformations in others because change has been so valuable for me. It is also incredibly rewarding to do work where I get to witness people drop their old emotional baggage, flourish, reconnect with themselves and generally become happier and healthier.

One thing that I have observed in my work and in my experience is that behind all the imbalances and struggles, the learning, the inner journeying, the trauma, the dropping of negative beliefs, the desire for change and a better life there lies a basic and simple longing for happiness in everyone.

A couple of years ago I turned my full attention to what could be called the science of happiness – positive psychology. This is a new and inspiring branch of psychology that was only born in the 1990s. Positive psychology studies what enables people to be happy, positive, in the flow and successful. It is full of invaluable tools and practices that enable anyone to increase their level of happiness and positive emotions.

I quickly became hooked on learning about positive psychology because it resonated with