How often do you find yourself wishing you felt happy? How often have you heard others wish for this seemingly elusive mental state? Very often. There isn’t a single sane person who doesn’t list happiness as something they want from life, and yet so few report actually feeling happy. Dissatisfaction runs rampant among us, a million little things pop up everyday like an impossible-to-beat game of Whack-o-Mole that keep us from liking the look of our lives. We think if only the moles would stay whacked down and the puzzle pieces would stay put, we might have a chance at happiness. Now, you may have heard this before, but there’s a good chance it didn’t make a lasting impact, so here it is again:

Happiness is an inside job. The outside circumstances of life have little to nothing to do with your happiness. It’s hard to believe, I know, but the extremely true fact of the matter is that you could have the job you want, the car you want, the partner you want, the home you want, the clothes you want, the entire full life package that you want and have always wanted, and still not feel happy. You could have all that and still feel miserable! Meanwhile, you are capable, believe it or not, of losing everything you thought you needed in life and finding a way to feel genuinely happy anyway. It sounds ridiculous, but nothing could be more true: happiness does not depend on what does or doesn’t happen, what you get or don’t get, it ONLY depends on the perspective you choose to have. If happiness is important to you, you can attain it, and here’s how:

• Practice Gratitude 
  If you’re a millionaire but don’t feel grateful for all you have, none of it will make you happy. Meanwhile, if you’re out of money but you think about the people who will always love you anyway, the roof over your head, the luxury of clean drinking water that not all people have, you can manifest the warmth of gratitude in your heart which will lead you to feeling happy quicker and easier than you could have imagined. It’s arguable, actually, that the pleasure you feel from true gratitude is happiness. 
   
• Practice Compassion
  A big block between you and happiness are the people who hurt you or make you angry. It may feel impossible to improve your mood and feel happy when somebody has pressed all your wrong buttons. In November of 2016, many were saying things along the lines of, “If this person is going to be president, how will I ever manage to feel happy in the next four years?” When profoundly troubled by somebody and their behavior, the best--and possibly only--antidote to misery is compassion. If you transmute your anger to compassion, and pray for whoever it is who you feel has wronged you, you reopen your chances at feeling happy . If you hold on to the hatred caused by what someone has done or said, happiness will become temporarily impossible for you. 
   
• Practice Acceptance and Trust 
  Just like how people upset us, so can the circumstances of life. If you don’t accept life on life’s terms, you’ll constantly feel at war with everything going on around you--and how will you feel happy when there’s a war in your mind? When there is something you don’t like happening in your life or the world, you have to ask yourself if you can change it. If the answer is yes, then get to work! If the answer is no, if there isn’t anything you can do to change it, then you must accept it. If you don’t, you’re fighting against happiness. 

Each of these bullet points contains the word “practice” because they aren’t things you can accomplish with the click of a button. You have to work at cultivating gratitude, compassion, and acceptance, and in order to do so you must practice. If you take as little as ten minutes every day to redirect your thoughts towards gratitude, compassion, and acceptance, you will gradually begin to feel happy, and it will have nothing to do with outer circumstances. The amazingly good news is that every single thing you need to feel happy exists already, and it’s all in your mind.