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1. Embrace Personal Agency
Believe you have control over your life and future, taking action to avoid learned helplessness, which degrades quality of life and longevity.
2. Manage Your Wants
Cultivate enduring satisfaction by managing your wants (wanting less) rather than constantly striving for more possessions or achievements.
3. Find Joy in Progress
Shift your focus from the ‘arrival fallacy’ of reaching goals to finding satisfaction and reward in the process and journey of progress itself.
4. Define Your Moral Principles
Write down your moral non-negotiables and make a plan to live in accordance with them, as inconsistency with personal values leads to unhappiness.
5. Practice Daily Contemplation
Dedicate at least five minutes daily to quiet contemplation (e.g., mindfulness, prayer, observing surroundings) to reduce distraction and connect with deeper thoughts.
6. Read Wisdom Literature Daily
Spend 15 minutes each day reading philosophical or religious texts to accumulate knowledge, enrich your life, and gain wisdom.
7. Transform Pleasure into Enjoyment
Elevate purely limbic pleasures (like food or alcohol) into deeper enjoyment by sharing them with people and creating lasting memories.
8. Prioritize Core Life Goals
Set your ultimate life goals around faith/philosophy, family, friendship, and work that serves others, using money, power, and fame only as intermediate tools.
9. Combat Anxiety Metacognitively
When anxious, write down your specific fears, analyze their causes, consider the worst-case scenarios, and plan your responses to move fear from emotion to logic.
10. Cultivate Hope Actively
Actively foster hope in your life, as it positively impacts physiological processes, encourages self-care, and contributes to a longer, better, more successful life.
11. Teach What You Learn
Share and teach the science of happiness to others, as this deepens your own understanding, reinforces learning, and holds you accountable.
12. Embrace Struggle for Satisfaction
Recognize that struggle and suffering are necessary components for achieving true joy and satisfaction in life.
13. Prioritize Family Connection
Actively maintain close relationships with adult children and grandchildren, even if it means turning down work, to foster deep family bonds.
14. Practice Daily Consistency
Establish daily routines for habits like exercise and healthy eating, as consistent daily effort is easier and more effective than sporadic attempts.
15. Engage in Vigorous Exercise
Use vigorous physical exercise to manage and lower negative affect (unhappiness), as it helps reduce stress hormones like cortisol.
16. Help Others to Increase Happiness
Volunteer or give charitably to boost your own mood and sense of empowerment, as focusing less on yourself leads to greater happiness.
17. Be Mindful of Emotional Contagion
Surround yourself with positive people and limit contact with those who spread negativity, as emotions are contagious ‘mind viruses’.
18. Practice Compassion, Not Empathy
In relationships, act compassionately by doing what others need out of love, even if it’s difficult, rather than being paralyzed by their pain.
19. Prioritize Your Own Happiness
Ensure your own well-being first, like putting on your own oxygen mask, to avoid being overwhelmed by others’ negativity and to help them more effectively.
20. Seek Complementary Partners
In romantic relationships, look for partners who complement your traits rather than being clones of yourself, and celebrate your differences.
21. Accept Partner’s Differences
Avoid the ’egotism’ of wishing your partner were more like you; instead, accept and appreciate their unique qualities.
22. Reframe Past Experiences
Look back at your childhood and past experiences to identify what you want to change or keep, actively designing your adult life based on these reflections.
23. Combat Negativity with Gratitude
Actively list and contemplate sources of gratitude to counteract the natural human tendency to focus disproportionately on negative events.
24. Embrace Moral Flexibility
Be open to evolving your moral principles and beliefs over time, resisting societal pressures to remain rigid in your views.
25. Don’t Aim for Pure Happiness
Understand that negative emotions are essential for survival, learning, and growth, so a life without unhappiness is neither desirable nor possible.
26. Focus on Controllable Factors
When faced with uncontrollable external circumstances, redirect your attention and energy to the aspects of your life that you can control.