Discover the secret to happiness and success

In today’s fast-paced world, you want to use every possible advantage available to you to get an edge over the competition. The hope is often that, by leveraging your success, you can eventually get to a point where your accomplishments and wealth award you a certain degree of happiness. As you’ll soon discover, this isn’t exactly how it works. In fact, happiness – far from being the result of all your hard work – is actually one of the tools you can use to increase your performance, and thus your quality of life.

What exactly is happiness? Formally, we defined happiness as “the experience of positive emotions,” but the truth is that happiness is highly subjective, relative to the individual experiencing it. Positive psychology shows that when we feel good and have a positive mindset, we are smarter, feel more motivated and enjoy more success.

Psychologists have known for a long time that negative emotions constrict our ability to think and act. In fact, you’ve probably experienced this first hand if you’ve ever felt too down in the dumps to leave the house. It’s therefore no great surprise that positive emotions can do the opposite: expand the scope of possibilities and open our minds to new ideas.

In terms of neurobiology, this is quite obvious. When we experience positive emotions, our brains become flooded with dopamine and serotonin – chemicals that both make us feel good and boost the parts of our brains responsible for learning by organizing new information, retaining it and more efficiently recalling it later on.

Quite simply, if you’re in a good mood, you’ll score better on a math test.

If you’ve ever felt work was easier when you’re in a good mood, then it was more than just a coincidence. Indeed, our brains perform best when we feel positive. Consider this study, in which the initial level of positive emotions of 272 employees at the same company were measured and compared with their performance over an eighteen-month period. Researchers found that those who started out happier also ended up receiving better evaluations and higher pay later on.

Interestingly, these successful people don’t see happiness as a reward for their hard work and accomplishments. Rather, they are successful precisely because of their positive mindsets, which allow them to make the most of their lives. This is the Happiness Advantage, the competitive edge gained by feeling positive, which then fuels performance.

Some people believe that they’re just not happy people, and feel that the benefits of positive emotions are lost to them. But the truth is that anyone can achieve the Happiness Advantage. It’s simply a matter of attitude and consistency. A good place to start is by showing appreciation for the small crumbs of positivity scattered throughout life. These include things like short but pleasant conversations with friends or even watching a funny video.

The next step is to actively bring yourself into a positive mood by consistently doing positivity exercises. One such exercise is meditation. In fact, research shows that the brains of monks who spend years meditating tend to exhibit growth in the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for feeling happy. But you don’t have to be a monk to take five minutes out of your day to focus on your breathing. All it takes is a little patience to increase your happiness and lower your stress.

Additionally, you can simply think about something you are looking forward to! Research shows that the most enjoyable part of an activity is not the activity itself, but the anticipation. So, just thinking about your next vacation can raise your endorphin levels by 27 percent.

While we can’t do much to manipulate our reality, we can change how we process the world – and how we react to it. You can take advantage of the fact that your brain’s resources are limited. Your brain has to decide whether to allocate its resources towards experiencing pain, negativity and stress or using those same resources to experience things like hope, optimism and meaning. Strangely, the way that we perceive our daily activities – more than the activities themselves – defines our reality. Having a positive mindset can lead to true happiness and increased performance. Indeed, the more you believe in your ability to succeed, the more likely that you will.

At this point, you should be convinced of the power of a positive mindset, and probably want to know what you can do right now to become more happy. For starters, understand that your mind adopts patterns of viewing the world. Basically, the more positivity your brain experiences, the more optimistic you will become. You should therefore actively seek positive experiences, as studies have shown that optimistic people set more difficult goals and put in more effort to attaining those goals than their pessimistic counterparts.

One way to direct your focus towards positivity would be to make a ritual of writing down three good things that happened the day before. This includes anything that was positive; it doesn’t have to be profound as long as it’s specific. For example, this could be a joke that made you laugh, an accomplishment, a strengthened connection and so on. While the task is simple, it requires consistency to be effective. If you can develop this habit, then you will constantly be on the lookout for positive experiences, which will in turn increase the quality of your day, and thus the quality of your life.

Fall up by turning negative momentum into positive momentum

A single situation can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, and these perspectives are of the utmost importance when it comes to your happiness and success. After a crisis or adversity, your mind follows one of three paths:

? The negative event produces no change, and you end where you started.

? Further negative consequences. You end up worse after the event; this path is why we are afraid of conflict and challenge

? The Third Path: use adversity and failure to become even stronger and more capable than before.

Finding the Third Path is the difference between those who become frozen by failure and those who surge above it. This is because people are not defined by the events that happen to them, but rather what they are able to produce from those events. Additionally, our mind creates counterfacts after crisis, i.e., alternate scenarios that help us to evaluate whatever just occurred. Your brain creates the counterfacts without your input, but you have the option of choosing which ones you want to believe. You should therefore choose the ones that make you feel good and produce positive outcomes for the future. Success isn’t about never falling down; it’s about pushing yourself up so that you can become happier and more successful. That is the Third Path: not falling down, but falling up.

One of the main drivers of success is the belief that we have control over our future, and is in fact one of the strongest drivers of well-being and performance. Those who believe they have power over their outcomes enjoy higher academic achievement, career accomplishment and are happier at work. Think of a successful athlete, for example: she doesn’t blame the referees or the weather when she loses, and certainly doesn’t attribute her wins to strokes of fortune.

This feeling of control can easily crumble, however, whenever our stress levels rise to the point where we feel we can no longer keep up. And when you place too much focus on the things you genuinely can’t control, you’ll become less happy and lose motivation and confidence. But this control can be regained! One way is to put your negative emotions into words. Write down what you’re feeling, or talk about it with someone you trust. Brain scans show that putting your negative emotions into words diminishes their power, and is ultimately the first step in regaining control.

At this point, you can push forward by concentrating on small goals. As you accumulate resources, knowledge and confidence, you’ll be able to accomplish even greater goals. In addition, make an effort to distinguish the features of the situation you can control and those you can't. One exercise you can use to do this is to make a list of two columns, one for things you can control and one for things you can’t. Don’t stress about the things that are out of your control. This will allow you to focus your energy and efforts on the things you can influence, thus increasing the chances of success. And don’t attack each item of your list at once! Even small successes add up to major achievements.

Willpower alone cannot affect change – instead, try to minimize barriers and form good habits. It should be obvious that exercise is good for you, while smoking is not, right? Yet, despite this knowledge, so many people fail when they try to adopt good habits or abandon bad ones. The problem is that they often rely on their willpower, but willpower is a limited resource, meaning the well can run dry. In fact, studies have shown that willpower is ineffective at maintaining lifestyle changes because willpower becomes depleted with overuse. So how do we establish – and sustain – good habits? It all boils down to reducing activation energy, the physical and mental energy needed to overcome inaction. What does activation energy look like in action?

Think about the writing exercise, in which you make a list of positive things that have happened to you in the last 24 hours. You can reduce your activation energy by keeping an open notebook and a pen on your nightstand.

If you want to get better at guitar, buy a guitar stand so you won’t complain about having to take it out of the closet and out of the case to start playing.

Or hide your pack of cigarettes from yourself if you want to smoke less.

These are simple, 20-second changes, but they can make a huge difference in your lifestyle.

Social support is one of your greatest assets.

Imagine your boss hands you a new project and you immediately immerse yourself in it, cutting yourself off from the rest of the world entirely. No socializing, no friends, nothing. There are only two outcomes in this scenario: either you sink and fail or you completely exhaust yourself trying to push through.

Successful people, however, know that their social relationships are valuable investment. Social interactions fill us with positivity, and as we strengthen our relationships over time, we raise our happiness baseline.

For instance, at the office, your team will see better results when more team members invest in social unity. Even the tiniest interactions around the water cooler can trigger happiness.

The obvious value of social interactions means that leaders should invest in creating atmospheres that foster them. Unfortunately, some leaders believe that they don’t have time for socializing with their employees, that they’ll lose authority or that there should be a clear distinction between work and friendship. But research at MIT has found that employees with strong bonds with their managers produce more profit than those with weaker bonds.

So, if you’re in a position of leadership, take the time to introduce new members of your team to everyone – even to different departments – or do things like scheduling team lunches. Most importantly: show gratitude. This is the most effective way to create bonds, so take time in the day to recognize someone for their accomplishments. Make sure this recognition is personal and especially in front of others if possible, like at a monthly meeting.

You have the power to share your happiness with the world. Surely you’ve seen someone yawn only to have the irresistible urge to yawn yourself. The same phenomenon occurs with happiness. When we start exploiting the Happiness Advantage, its benefits multiply, spreading throughout our communities and societies. In other words, they’re not just for us!

When you use these principles to make positive changes to your life, you’re unconsciously transforming the behaviors of untold numbers of people too. For instance, you might influence your son, who in turn influences his best friend, who then also influences her sister and so on. This is called the ripple effect.

Neuroscience explains this unconscious adoption of behavior with mirror neurons. These cause you to imitate the behavior of others or experience what you believe they’re experiencing. The same thing applies for your mindset: if you feel anxious or otherwise negative, it’s likely that this will cause your colleagues to feel the same way. Of course the opposite is true as well: the happier you are, the happier everyone around you will be. Businesses have known this for a while; that’s why TV sitcoms use a laugh track!

Sometimes, these ripple effects are so large that they generate a butterfly effect, i.e., the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane on the other side of the world. Indeed, small changes can trigger enormous ones. And each one of us is like the butterfly: just one person using the Happiness Advantage can positively change the dynamics of a complete group, and even the world.

Happiness doesn’t come from success. In fact, quite the opposite is true: your success depends on your happiness! Luckily, finding happiness doesn’t require you to make huge changes in your life. All you have to do is adjust your perspective and notice the positive things that are already there.