Me, my life, mythoughts, mywisdom.: In Pursuit of Happiness!

Saturday Morning….a lazy day for me. I was going thru the crisp and

fresh newspaper over my cuppa chai. The headlines…or rather the image in the headline caught my attention. It was that of Dalai lama giving a speech at HT leadership summit. I rather lazily read the caption below the image. It read “The art of happiness in troubled times” Happiness in troubled times? I thought. How can a person ever be happy in troubled times? I thought of doing a little research on this topic. I found some interesting facts about happiness. I share them here:

Happiness is all of the good that someone experiences combined into one emotion. This emotion can, and usually does, bring out the best in people. So next time you want to look your best….you know what to do…just be happy.

Although things might be hard to deal with at that moment, people need to realize that they will be able to learn from their experiences and that they will learn to take the good from them all. So in troubled times, feed your brain with positive thoughts that this is just your learning time and you are definitely going to reap in good benefits after the trouble passes by.

And remember, In the end, the hard times will help people strive for happiness. Happiness isn't free. You have to earn it and work to keep it. The price for happiness is having to suffer and having to question events that occur during one's life. People need to be able to adapt to their surroundings so that they can get the best out of them.

You can't live your life in fear of what can go wrong. You just need to go out and live your life to the fullest and know that you'll be happy, even if something doesn't go the way that you had planned it to.

Happiness is not a life without problems, but rather the strength to overcome the problems that come our way. There is no such thing as a problem-free life; difficulties are unavoidable. But how we experience and react to our problems depends on us.

And now 20 amazing facts about happiness:

Genes and upbringing influence about 50% of the variation in our personal happiness, our circumstances (income and environment) affect only about 10 percent. The remaining 40% is accounted for by our outlook and activities, including our relationships, friendships and jobs, our engagement in the community and our involvement in sports and hobbies.
A good mood has a distinct smell. Scientists have found that people can judge whether someone is in a positive mood from their body odour alone.
Older people are more satisfied with there lives than younger people: a recent survey by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention found that people aged 20-24 are sad for an average of 3.4 days per month as opposed to just 2.3 days for people aged 65-74.
If you do 20 minutes of exercise, three days per week for six months, your general feeling of happiness will improve by 10-20%.
People who rate in the upper reaches of happiness on psychological tests develop about 50% more antibodies than average in response to flu vaccines.
According to researchers at The World Database of Happiness at Erasmus University in Holland, Denmark is officially the happiest nation in the world, followed closely by Malta, Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland and Canada.
In the USA clinical depression is 3-10 times more common today than two generations ago.
Immigrants tend to acquire the happiness characteristics of the nation to which they move, not the nation from which they were born.
Richer workers tend to be happier than poorer colleagues, but research suggests that happy people tend to have greater potential to become rich, so it’s a chicken or egg scenario.
People who suffer strokes or other debilitating diseases suffer tremendously in the short term but after a while their happiness is only slightly below the average of the population.
When people get married their happiness peaks, but after a while their happiness returns to the level it was before they got married.
Women tend to experience their all-time lowest life satisfaction at age 37, whereas men typically experience this at 42.
Having 100-200 belly laughs a day is the equivalent of a high impact workout, burning off up to 500 calories.
Gold doesn't guarantee happiness. Studies of Olympic athletes found that bronze medal winners are happier than silver medal winners and sometimes happier than gold medalists.
The late pioneering social psychologist Professor Michael Argyle, who conducted many happiness studies, showed that among the things that made people happy are sport, music and - most of all dancing. Encouraging sports facilities everywhere would greatly increase a nation’s happiness. Group dancing which, which combines, exercise, music, community, touch and rules, also drastically increases happiness.
Several studies have shown that a pet can reduce blood pressure and stress, promoting health and happiness.
After basic needs are met, extra material wealth has little or no effect on life satisfaction or happiness.
People in steady relationships are generally happier than singles.
In nations with high levels of income equality, such as the Scandinavian countries, happiness tends to be higher than in nations with unequal wealth distribution, such as the USA. People tend to prefer more local autonomy and more direct democracy to increased income.
According to a new look at a 40 year old study on child rearing practices conducted at Harvard University, those children who were hugged and cuddled more grew up to be the happiest.