The Secret to Happiness

Feeling happy is all about your thoughts. You can’t have a feeling without first having a thought. Therefore, if you’re feeling happy, it’s because you’re thinking happy thoughts.

Same is true for sad. If you’re sad, it’s because you’re thinking sad thoughts.

So the secret to happiness is to pay attention to your feelings. They’ll keep you on track. They’re the feedback to tell you what you’re thinking.

Yeah. I know. We’re the ones doing the thinking, so we should know what we’re thinking. Right?

Not if we’re not paying attention.

Have you ever had a tiny thought that just started escalating? Some little something that irked you? And you just kept building on that thought without even being aware of it?

Pretty soon, you’re on a rampage. Your fists are clenched, your teeth are clenched. Smoke is streaming from your ears, fire from your nostrils. You open your mouth and mean, hateful words spew forth…

We’ve all been there.

All because of some stray little thought, that had we caught it right then, in its embryo stages, would’ve died a gentle, non-assuming death. Instead that negative thought spawned a negative feeling, which spawned another negative thought and on and on until it grew to giant-sized proportions. Grew to a dramatic verbalization about something probably not even related to the first little thought.

So now how do you feel?

Yup. Not in a very good mood. Right?

When you learn how to pay attention to your feelings, you can catch these bad-mood-makers in their baby stages. You can learn how to think happy thoughts more often.

It’s not easy, paying attention to our feelings. We’re so used to just being. We don’t stop to analyze our thoughts or even our feelings. Why should we? We are. That’s enough.

Only it isn’t enough.

If we truly want to be happy, we really need to pay attention to our feelings. And when our feelings tell us we’re not happy, we need to do something about it. Like change our thinking.

Right now.

Because, remember, happy thoughts create happy feelings. And happy feelings create more happy thoughts. And more happy thoughts create…happiness.

The author, Mollie Manuell, likes to be happy. How about you? Her website has more tips and information on being happy.