One of the most difficult lessons I ever learned, and one that I have to keep reminding myself of from time to time, is that happiness comes from within.

I realized just the other day as I was thinking through everything I needed to get done on a very big project that I had forgotten to be happy. I was feeling a lot of stress: time pressure, financial pressure, social pressure, and even self-imposed pressure to perform, and I simply forgot about my happiness. And you know what? I became unhappy.

It’s really not hard to be happy. In The Power of Attitude, I pointed out that every emotion you have is a choice. This includes happiness.

But if it’s so easy, how come more people aren’t happy more of the time? I believe the main reason is that most people don’t understand their personal role in their happiness. Most people think that happiness comes from without.

Every day you hear things like “I’d be happy if…” or “When X happens, everything will be OK again…”. People honestly think that their happiness is tied to some factor or set of factors outside of their own body. But it isn’t.

Happiness is a choice.

I bet if you wanted to, you could get mad in an instant. Try this: think about the last thing your boss (child, spouse, pet, neighbor, …) did that really pissed you off. Put yourself back in that situation, and get fired up! See how quickly you can get angry?

Happiness is exactly the same. It’s just that we don’t practice it as much. For some reason, we have been culturally trained to believe that happiness just happens, that it is outside of our control.

We get a lot of practice being angry. We practice being stressed. We practice complaining about what’s wrong at the moment, and in doing so, we bring all our focus on to the negatives in life.

With one little change, though, you can be happy. Just change your focus. Instead of complaining about what’s wrong, celebrate what’s right. Instead of going over your mistake one more time, congratulate yourself for something you did right. Instead of feeling longing for what you don’t have, feel gratitude for what you do.

I’ve heard some people suggest that choosing to be happy is incompatible with success. I think this is absolute baloney. I’ll discuss that in more depth next week.

For now, just remember to be happy. Look at the silver lining, and be grateful for it. Your whole life will improve as a result.

In the news

• That damn rock ‘n’ Roll will be the death of us all! MP3 Player Headphones May Throw Off Cardiac Devices
• Yes, getting dinner ready for Rover is still food preparation: Pet food sickened at least 79 people, CDC says
• Sounds like they’re working on a hot-rod, not conducting biological research: Souped-up immune cells catch disguised HIV

Quote for the week

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be. - Marcel Pagnol

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

“Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” With those words, James Dean proved himself to be a very wise man.

As a child I remember having very big dreams. I wanted it all, and then some. I wanted infinite riches, the best cars, airplanes, and boats that could be bought. I wanted a mansion on every continent. I wanted to see everything there was to see and to do everything there was to do. I wanted to go into space, to see the bottom of the ocean, to climb mountains and cross deserts. If it could be imagined, I had imagined it. I wanted, wanted, wanted… Although I never had a plan, I sure had the dreaming part down.

Many people I know get stuck in dreaming mode, like I was so many years ago. It’s easy to dream, to desire, to want. It’s easy to look at what you don’t have or what you don’t have enough of and to desire more. And it’s fun! The imagination is a powerful place.

And then I grew up. I started working, started taking responsibility for my finances and my time. And suddenly, it wasn’t so easy to dream. Suddenly, it was really pretty difficult just to cover the basics and have a little left for fun. While I did take up some hobbies and activities (skydiving and scuba-diving, for instance), I found that most of my time was spent building wealth for others. The dreams started to die. I was making a living, but I wasn’t living.

Truly living is about following your dreams. Sometimes they work out exactly as you planned, other times they come out vastly different from anything you could have prepared yourself for, but always they feed your inner spirit. Living your dream is fulfillment of the soul.

Living and dreaming go hand-in-hand. A dream by itself is perpetually unfulfilled. A dreamless life is perpetually unfulfilling.

Somewhere along the way I remembered again, both how to dream and how to live my dreams. Now I regularly pick a ‘next thing’ and then prepare for it and do it (or sometimes I skip the preparation and just do it, regardless of the result). And you know what? Life is fantastic as a result!

What do you dream about? Are your dreams material? Spiritual? Emotional? Do they revolve around a common theme, like travel or knowledge? Or have you forgotten to dream for a while? Are your dreaming gears rusting from lack of use?

Take the time regularly to dream. Remind yourself daily to feed the imagination and to let your mind wander, and see where it takes you.

Then take some of those dreams and go do them. Maybe everyone else tells you that you can’t do something or that you’re crazy to try. Let them believe that, then come back and tell them what it was like. Others may choose to live without living, but me: I live.

In the news

• Maybe we should outlaw grey skies: Rainfall autism theory suggested
• How about adult’s play? Child’s play ‘better than a jog’
• Ack! She has cooties! Women’s hands ‘harbour more bugs’

Quote for the week

If you have only two pennies left in the world, with the first penny, you should buy rice to feed your family. With the second penny, say the wise Japanese, you should buy a lily. - Japanese Proverb

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

How often have you found yourself looking at a pile of paperwork and thinking, ‘I really need to take care of that.’? Or maybe you’ve been putting off a task or project because you’re waiting for just the right time. We all procrastinate occasionally, and some of us are very proficient procrastinators. But I have found, from experience, that procrastination rarely if ever pays off.

Why do we put things off? We always have rational-sounding reasons: perhaps the weather isn’t quite right for mowing the lawn, or I need information from someone else before I can proceed with this paperwork. On the surface, these reasons sound downright responsible. But humans are rationalization beings; that is, we are unique in that, of all species on earth, we are the only ones with minds designed to rationalize. It makes sense, then, that we can rationalize anything we want, with a little practice.

And, in fact, we do. We do it so well that we don’t realize we are doing it. Every action, however strange to an observer, seems completely reasonable to the person doing it. Every decision, every choice, every expression can be explained once we put our minds to it. Including not doing the things we want or need to do to achieve our goals.

And so we procrastinate, and we do it by explaining to ourselves and others just exactly why it isn’t procrastinating. But it is. And if you can’t honestly see this going on in at least yourself, then you have some work to do being honest with yourself.

With twenty or thirty or more years of convincing ourselves that our reasons for not getting things done make sense, however, we’ve developed some deeply-ingrained habits of putting things off. And that takes some work to overcome.

So here are some suggestions to get out of the laziness habits and get to work on important things:

• Pick just one simple thing that you can finish quickly and do it: Getting anything done, no matter how trivial, is a step in the right direction. It helps exercise the habit.
• Cross off anything that doesn’t move you closer to your long-term goals: If it isn’t specifically applicable to your long-term plan, ask yourself if it matters. If not, cross it off. In this way, you can eliminate a lot of the fluff that keeps you from doing the things that really matter.
• Block out time in your calendar for your to-do list: Maybe there are a few things that you know will take a while but that you really need to ensure get done. Mark time in your calendar to work on them. Give yourself more time than you think you need. Once the time comes, do them no matter what until you are out of time or they are complete. It might even make sense to have 30 minutes every morning devoted to your task list, time that you aren’t doing anything but attending to the items that have piled up since yesterday.
• Celebrate each completion: Every time you finish something on your list, celebrate! It may not seem like a big deal to clean the litter-box, but celebrate it anyway. Make sure you get a good feeling inside when you complete an important task, and it will be easier to start the next one. After a few celebrations, you’ll look forward to getting things done.

There is no time like now to get busy with the things you need to do. Pick something and get started. Better yet, get it done.

In the news

• Purple tomatoes?: Purple Tomato Extended Lives of Cancer-Prone Mice
• Why couldn’t it be chocolate-enriched? Cherry-Enriched Diet Cut Heart Risks in Rats
• This makes it easier to get them to eat all those tomatoes and cherries: High Fructose Diet Inhibits Appetite Hormone

Quote for the week

Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today. - James Dean

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff

I have a pet peeve. Actually, I have several, but there is one in particular that I’m going to share with you today. I really don’t like it when someone makes a what sounds like a request but expects a certain response. And people do this in many ways, and at many times throughout the day.

The most common type of loaded request is the question from the boss: ‘Could you have this on my desk by tomorrow afternoon?’. We all know he isn’t asking us, he expects the report to be delivered. That expectation is what makes it a demand and not a request.

And this is why it bothers me when people expect a certain reply, response, or result. They have not made a request, they have made a demand. When you demand something of me, you ruffle my feathers.

Certain kinds of expectation are, well, expected. I’m expected to be at work at a certain time. I’m expected to pay my bills. There are demands on me from the world I live in and as a result of the choices I make, and I fully accept those. I have obligations that I live up to.

But it’s completely different when someone makes a demand of me outside of those obligations. If I have an agreement with you, then sure, you are right to expect me to live up to my end of the agreement. But if we don’t have an agreement, then demands are inappropriate.

If you expect a particular result, then you are making a demand. It’s that simple. Make sure you communicate this clearly. Be respectful, be polite, but also be sure they understand what you are expecting. Make a statement. If you are not expecting a particular outcome, then just be aware of the words you are using. Ask a question. Check-in with yourself before you ask and make sure you can accept any answer equally well. If you can, then you truly have no expectation.

How do you avoid accidentally (or intentionally) making demands of others? It all comes from your frame of mind when you communicate your desire with them. Do you expect a certain response?

The easiest way is to look at your approach in reverse. Did you convey your request in the form of a question? Did you mean it as a question? If you asked the other person, and it was a genuinely open question where you can accept any answer, then you can honestly say you haven’t made a demand.

What do you expect? Can you let go of those expectations a little? Can you let replies from others be what they are and be fine with them?

What do you expect of yourself? Can you relax those expectations as well?

In the news

• And I thought breaking up by email was rude: Sex Partners Get STD Alerts by E-mail
• You probably shouldn’t do this via email: Telling your honey, ‘it’s time for a diet’
• This assumes they’re not getting STD notifications: More men than women find happiness online

Quote for the week

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. - Benjamin Disraeli

Healthy thoughts,
Jeff