Authentic Happiness

At the root of everyone’s behavior is the desire to be happy.  Our brains are hard wired to chase pleasure and avoid pain.  When we feel good, we do good.  We eat more nutritious foods, we move our bodies with physical activity, and the healthy choices become the easy and natural choices. 

Happy can mean a lot of different things as we are all unique individuals, but there are a few common factors that contribute to authentic happiness.  The best indicator of happiness is the quality of a person’s close relationships.  In general, the happier you are in your social environment, the happier you are as an individual. 

Having a hobby or a career that you are passionate about is another contributing factor to authentic happiness.  This helps to give us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.  When we can get lost in the moment of the hobby we enjoy, it fills us up energetically much the same as food nourishes the body.
Finally, prosocial behavior such as random acts of kindness and volunteer work have been shown to improve happiness.  These activities are life giving and heart filling.  Serving others is a great way to refuel energetically. 

Life has many pleasures.  The idea behind authentic happiness is to savor life’s pleasures at a deep level.  There are four ways to achieve this which include:

Luxuriating – indulging in all your senses
Marveling – losing yourself in the wonder of the event and emotions associated with it
Thanksgiving – counting blessings and expressing gratitude
Basking – congratulations and receipt of praise
I personally like questionnaire’s as benchmarks for my journey.  I found a particular website entitled Authentic Happiness that has a multitude of questionnaire’s to utilize.