Michael

The amount you laugh in your relationships with others is the true measure of the health of your personality.- Brian Tracy

Are you laughing enough? Do you spend time with friends or significant others smiling, joking and laughing?

Regularly having fun and laughing consistently are important for continued emotional and mentally health. In fact, laughter has a positive effect on your immune system and heart health. It is great at reducing stress and relaxing the whole body.

Laughter can be the perfect attitude adjustment and helps the mind to think more clearly. Your perspective can broaden with regular laughter. In the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses experiments showing that the simple act of making a face can quickly change your emotional state. We all know that our emotions translate to facial expressions, but these experiments showed that producing a smile or frown actually caused the corresponding emotions to express themselves. I found that fascinating.

So, a simple technique to help you lift out of a bad mood would be to smile even if you initially don’t mean it. The act of smiling will cause a positive shift in your emotional state. The more you do this, the better you can feel.

Smile a lot. Laugh as much as you can every day. Find humor in every situation.

Michael

If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth. – Saint Bartholomew

We know more than we think. We understand more about ourselves than we may believe. The issue is that we don’t believe those facts or we haven’t taken the time for introspection that is needed. Knowing yourself is a critical key to change. Of course, if you don’t want to change or grow, then not knowing yourself would be more beneficial

I think that most of the times, fear is the barrier to truly know ourselves. We are afraid of what we really think or know. That’s for the simple reason that it may very conflict with how we are currently acting, behaving or dealing with situations in our lives. It could affect how and where we work. It could affect the nature of our relationships. If you have been unconsciously hiding behind a facade you could very well not even realize why you don’t feel as good as you could about your life.

The more you understand your motivations, desires, internal beliefs, emotional state in various life situations and thought processes, the better you will be able to stay in a state of relative happiness. If you repress your own truth, push away negative thoughts without facing them and don’t listen to your own intuition, the less likely you will lead a fulfilling life.

This can be scary for a variety of reasons; fear of rejection, fear of being judged, fear of the unknown and etc. But, the benefits of getting in touch with your true self are astronomical. It may be hard to fathom this if you have been living a lie or have not really looked deep inside.

Say what you mean. Follow your dreams. Don’t feel guilty about your desires. Believe in your ability to adjust to life’s problems. Know and understand yourself in a variety of situations. Give yourself a break. Basically, chill out a bit.

Michael

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves. – Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Life is full of events, circumstances that change and new directions that force us to grow. Life is about change. How we meet those changing aspects of our lives is one of the key ingredients that determine our level of happiness.

Everyone, from birth, is trained to react to situations that arise. Sometimes we view these life events as battlegrounds where we must fight to stay the same or fight to keep from losing what we are comfortable with. Fighting though prevents us from growing, from expanding and from changing our perspective. Happiness is elusive when we are fighting for our “lives.”

The way we react and respond is always under our control. Life is a ride. We can decide whether we are in the driver’s seat or just going along for the ride. Our daily attitude and the way we react to live events determine whether we are driving or not. I don’t know about you, but driving is much more enjoyable because it means I have the choice of where to go, what to do and how to react.

Life isn’t creating us. We are creating our lives.

Have a great day!

Michael