7 Ways to Find Happiness

If you were to ask the average person what they want most, nine times out of ten the answer would be more money. It seems that our culture has been brainwashed into believing that having more - a new car, a new house, new TV - more 'stuff' brings happiness. There's nothing wrong with wanting to move ahead and have nice things but when our happiness depends on having it we will be let down. We all want happiness but sometimes we look in the wrong places. Looking to find happiness in the acquisition of possessions or hoping that another person will bring that to us is a pursuit in disappointment.

Authentic happiness comes from the inside. If you are already happy more money will make your life much more enjoyable but if you don't have happiness already more 'stuff' brings only temporary happiness. Look to find happiness first. How can you do that? Here are the first steps:

1. Decide: that this your time, your life and you are going to be happy. Never underestimate the power that comes from making a commitment.

2. Stay in the moment: most of our unhappiness comes from living in the future or living in the past. Your power is in the moment. When we worry about things that have not happened we are bringing in unhappiness or disappointment from the future. There is no guarantee that it will happen so living in the future is simply taking on disheartening moments that will bring you down. Living in the past, going over past failures and regrets only serves to make us feel bad. Just learn from it and put it behind you.

3. Get Rid of Negative Thinking: Become aware of your thoughts, keep a journal and write down all the negative thoughts you have. When you become aware of your negative thoughts you will more easily recognize them and get rid of them.

4. Do Fun Things: Instead of wallowing in your misfortunes find something fun to do.

5. Appreciate: Look around you focus on all the good things you have in your life. Everyone has something that they can be thankful for - their children, their home, fresh air, singing birds, sunshine, quiet music, etc.

6. Be Around Happy People: As they say, 'misery attracts company'. Be aware of this and choose to be around people who are cheerful. They will definitely improve your mood.

7. Don't take Life Too Seriously: Learn to laugh at yourself. Everyone makes mistakes - it's human. Life has a way of throwing us things we weren't expecting. When this happens, find a way around it and give yourself time to get over it and move on. Ask yourself, "Will I be thinking about this next year this time"?

P.S. Choose to be Happy

Copyright 2007 Sheila Dicks

Sheila Dicks is a transition and style coach who helps individuals move through smooth and purposeful change. You can find her at http://www.sheiladicks.com

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Addiction and Alcoholics

Is addiction new? No. It is thought that one of our ancestors may have discovered the effects of fermented fruit or grain by accident, or inadvertently inhaled smoke from herb leaves tossed on a fire. As a result, getting high or intoxicated-getting out of oneself in an artificial way-has been a goal or at least part of every culture. "Drunkenness" has been seen as a problem in various societies for a long time, and when it gets out of hand, it has been punished. Until fairly recently, however, most psychoactive drugs were legal. Nineteenth-century America has been called a "dope paradise," and it was only in the early 20th century that drugs began to be seen as sources of "abuse" that needed to be regulated by laws. Even alcohol was outlawed in the United States in the early 20th century. But laws have not stopped people from using alcohol or drugs.

When these substances were declared illegal, the whole process went underground and got otherwise complicated, with, for example, more people pointing fingers at the evils of drink and fewer potential professional hands available to help. In the second half of the 20th century, the drug scene got even more dramatic. In the 1960s, due partly to the "hippie" culture and partly to addictions fostered overseas during the Vietnam War, the use of drugs became more socially acceptable or at least widespread. During the same period, the pharmaceutical industry developed increasingly sophisticated prescription drugs, which started to be abused. Those scared away from criminally connected illegal drugs devised creative ways to use prescription drugs and other substances to alter their consciousness.

Statistics show that teens' use of such substances has grown as use of other substances has declined, but pharmaceuticals are potentially just as dangerous as other drugs. Though potions for "curing" drunkenness were on the market hundreds of years ago, the primary approach to dealing with alcoholism and addiction has historically been to make it illegal or shameful or both. Even with the advent of serious research in the 1930s, people addicted to drugs were thought to have a moral failing rather than a health problem, so approaches stressed punishment rather than prevention or therapy. The idea that alcoholism might be a disease spread in this country only around 1940, in part because of the popularization of Alcoholics Anonymous, and later by the acceptance of the disease concept by the American Medical Association. Today, thanks to scientific breakthroughs in brain studies, the approach to addiction has changed dramatically, showing that it is a disease that affects both the brain and behavior.

The path of nicotine illustrates the process by which substances move from popular fad to social outcast. Cigarettes were once used just by a small segment of society, but then they were marketed as a sign of sophistication and reached a wider slice of the population. As time passed, the facts about nicotine came to light, and people of all ages found ways to stop lighting up. The same can be true of any substance of abuse.

With new knowledge of how addiction works, you and your generation have the power to change the future, to take actions that will stop the history of addiction and alcoholism from repeating itself. Because the good news about substance use disorders is that they can be successfully treated, and the more that is known about the addictive properties of each substance, the more effectively they can be treated. The process of addiction is quite similar for most kinds of addictive drugs, but each type has its own characteristics. Though substances of abuse act on the dopamine pathway in the brain, alcohol and drugs can each affect different neurological circuits. Abuse of alcohol, for instance, may create changes in the brain that result in increased feelings of stress that may trigger further compulsive drinking.

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Head Versus Heart

How do you make the important decisions in your life? Do you use your head? Are you a logical thinker? Or do you use your heart? Do you rely on your intuition and decide what to do by listening to that little voice in your gut?

Most of you have a propensity to one type of decision making over the other. That is, you either make important decisions on the basis of your intuition or on the basis of your head. But is there a more balanced way to make decisions?

If you merely rely on your head, your decisions will:

1. Lack the emotional components that are necessary to solve problems.
2. Lack integrity since it depends on your personality and character which is imbued in emotions and feelings.
3. Be too principled and cold, giving them an inhumane feel.
4. Cause a lot of discontent because your emotions and feelings will be lacking in such a
decision.

If, on the other hand, you merely rely on your heart to make decisions, your decisions will:

1. Be irrational and have no rational or objective components.
2. Rely on feelings and emotions only.
3. Lack level headedness.
4. Be too short-lived and temporary.

If you make decisions using both your head and heart, your decisions will:

1. Involve both rational deliberative components, and feelings and emotions.
2. Be objective and include some emotional elements.
3. Include both your personal and impersonal elements, making for a more balanced decision.
4. Be effective and efficient in solving your problem in a balanced manner.

So, the next time you need to make an important decision in your life, make sure that it involves both your head and heart. That way you will be making a balanced and rational decision that has emotional components. In this way, cognitive errors can be eliminated and you can feel more secure in your solution to your problem.

Irene S. Roth is a freelance writer for teens and tweens. She writes nonfiction articles in the areas of self-assertiveness and self-confidence. If you are interested in some of these issues, she also has a blog for girls at: http://www.adolescentgirlsblog.wordpress.com.

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Be Happy Inside and Live Life to the Fullest

Never take advice on happiness from a person who is not happy. Why should you take advice from the wicked stepmother when you can ask from Cinderella who is supposedly the happy one? Aside from that, it is also best to seek the company of positive people. Like attracts like so if you are surrounded by positive people, more or less their happiness will rub of on you and more positive events will happen in your life.

So many people have asked how to be happy inside. The answer can only be found within them. If you are one of them and you do not have any clue as to how you should make yourself happy. It is time to be introspective. Take a look inside your heart. Feel your pain. Feel your happiness. Search for certain childhood memories that have made you happy. Concentrate on those. Search for things that you lack and try to give them to you one at a time. You will find yourself loving yourself even more. Avoid stress if you can. Manage your time wisely. Time mismanagement can be one of the leading causes of pain in your life. Talk to somebody, a therapist perhaps, if you have issues that you need to deal with that are causing you to be unhappy. You need to deal with it first before you can release it.

Do not get me wrong because sometimes even if we are experiencing pain, we are still happy and sometimes when we are laughing our hearts out we are in pain. This is the truth because the truth of the matter is we cannot be unhappy most of the time.

Cheryl Forbes owns and operates the website http://www.behappyinside.com

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So You Think You Have a Drinking Problem?

So you think you might have a drinking problem? Or does someone you know struggle with their drinking? If so then you should figure out the extent of the problem so that you can take the proper course of action. It could be merely alcohol abuse, or it could be alcoholism or alcohol addiction. In order to properly treat someone you will need to know exactly which problem it is.

The first experiment you should do is to simply stop drinking for 30 days. If you can pull this off without any problems whatsoever then chances are good that you were only abusing alcohol and you were not really addicted to it. Another thing you can try is to limit the amount that you drink each day for the next month to only 1 drink each day if you are a woman or 2 drinks each day if you are a man. If you have no trouble with completing this experiment successfully then you are probably not an alcoholic. If there are any doubts about the outcomes of these two experiments then you should probably scratch the whole thing and start over again fresh with renewed enthusiasm. If you keep having problems with these challenges and really cannot make it through them successfully without any slip ups, then it is probably the case that your drinking problem is leaning towards alcohol addiction or alcoholism.

If that is the case then you are likely a true alcoholic. This means you are addicted to alcohol and, even if you do not drink every day, you still always return to alcohol eventually and it sometimes gets you into big trouble. There are alcoholics out there who are binge drinkers and do not drink every day, but once they start drinking they cannot stop. It might seem like these people are only abusing alcohol but in fact they are real alcoholics and therefore need a different kind of help.

So if you are not addicted to alcohol and are merely abusing the stuff, what should you do? The answer is that you need to stop or limit your drinking. You need to pattern your everyday life after one of the two experiments that we've discussed and do them for the rest of your life. Either abstain from alcohol or limit yourself accordingly. Either solution will work just fine if you are not really an alcoholic. Either solution will work for you and be no problem to follow if you are not alcoholic.

On the other hand, if you find it impossible to live that way, and cannot successfully limit yourself like this, then you are a true alcoholic and you need help of a different nature. Basically, you need to abstain completely and figure out a different way to live your life. This is no small order and you have to be prepared to invest a lot of time and effort into any solution that is going to help you in this case.

For example, many will go to rehab or treatment in order to stop drinking. Alcoholics who manage to find long term sobriety and success after treatment are those who follow up with a ton of action and after care plans. This generally means that they go to lots of meetings and network with others in recovery as a new way of life. Anything less than this tends to produce relapse.

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Reinvent Your Wheel of Life

Sometimes life gets very comfortable, and you wake up each day and know what is in store for you. You follow your daily routine with the same movements and even thoughts. Perhaps you brush your teeth, feed your cats, start the coffee and check your email.

You wake up one day and life has changed. This could be for many reasons:

1. losing your job

2. moving to a new city

3. divorce

4. children leaving the nest

5. financial change in your life

You ask yourself, "what am I going to do with my life now?" First of all look at whatever happens in your life as opportunity to grow, learn, change and be inspired.

Take out a pen and paper and start writing. First start writing about all the things you would like to do, and include everything you can possibly think of. Take another sheet of paper and write all the obstacles you have which are preventing your having the perfect life.

Take out a third sheet of paper and write all the things you can do that are feasible to make your life be just as you want.

You can start writing a book that has been in your head for a long time. Perhaps you want to learn how to style hair. Maybe your dream is to be a web designer. You can easily find courses in your city or online. If you need to bring in dollars get a simple and no brainer job while studying for your new career.

If your kids have moved out why not start having fun? Take some classes, learn to paint, get in great shape. Whatever you wish to do with your time do it! There are so many ways to reinvent your wheel, and think how much fun you will have turning it.

Carol Stanley has been a speaker and writer for over thirty years. Getting older is reality but getting old does not have to be is her montra for life. There are many simple solutions for staying healthy, happy and enjoying life as we head towards senior years. http://www.boomercarol.com

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Can You Attract Abundance and Prosperity?

When you turn on the news right now, it seems like all you hear about is how bad the economy is and you also hear so many tragic stories. From people losing their homes, their jobs and their savings, it may seem like there is no reason to think positive about your financial future. But, can you still attract abundance and prosperity in your life with all of the tragic things going on right now?

That seems to be a popular question right now. And the truth is that yes, you can attract abundance and prosperity in your life right now. There is still opportunity out there. And if you have not lost your job, this is as great a push as you can get to really start building up your savings and investments so that you do not ever have to worry about your financial future.

LESSONS FROM LIFE...

Every so often, we get a lesson from life about what we should be doing. When you take a look at the current financial situation, you can see that there are constant reminders of why you need to learn how to take control of your financial future. There are also countless reminders of why it is important to learn how to attract more of what you want in life so that you do not have to experience what you do not want.

No matter what you may hear, the world is still full of opportunity and there is still many ways that you can attract wealth and goodness into your life.

Learn how to attract love, money, or happiness or all three in YOUR LIFE NOW! Go to http://www.successfulfather.com/signup/ and SIGN up for the FREE newsletter and BOOKMARK the site and return as often as you can! You can attract the life that you truly desire! Learn HOW!

Law of Attraction Secrets

Bryan Appleton is an investor/entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to teaching others how to achieve their dream life. He is also a proud single father with one son. You can publish this article as long as you leave it intact and in full as well as keeping the url link clickable

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