Instead of searching for happiness, try these 3 tips instead

What are the little things we can do every day to boost our confidence and increase happiness? originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Jonathan Fields, Author of How to Live a Good Life, Founder of Good Life Project, on Quora.

Funny enough, one of the things that tends to boost happiness least is trying to focus specifically on making or thinking yourself happy. There’s actually research that says that the dogged pursuit of happiness can make us less happy.

Part of this is because happiness is more like a snapshot than a movie. It is a moment in time, it’s fleeting. But most of us try to lock it down as a persistent state. That is futile. The only thing it leads to is persistent misery. Also, a healthy dose of how happy we can be is determined by genetics, we have some control, but nowhere near full. If we look at someone who is “wired” to be mightily happy all the time when we’re not, our inability to rise to that person’s level of giddiness can crush us.

I love the words of Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. Happiness, he says, cannot be “pursued,” it must “ensue.”

What does he mean by that? Simply that happiness tends to happen more as the side-effect of many other pursuits and activities. So, here are some things to explore that’ll help cultivate happiness “on the side”…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE