When you feel happy with yourself and your life, you enjoy life much more, and your life also feels much more important, valuable, meaningful, and worth living. Also, others tend to enjoy being around you more when you’re happy, which improves your social interactions.
For all these reasons, being happy with yourself benefits you and makes your life better in every way. And this means it’s clearly in your best interest to take action to feel happy and enjoy your life more, rather than feel bad about yourself and your life, which can make you miserable and depressed.
With this in mind, right now you’re going to learn how to become happier by making 3 simple changes in your thinking, so that you find it much easier to be happy instead of depressed, and so that you enjoy all the wonderful benefits of happiness immediately.
How to feel happy when depressed
Imagine you’re struggling with depression, and someone tells you, “That’s easy to fix. Just be happy instead of depressed.”
You might want to strangle that kind of person. After all, if it was that easy to be happy instead of depressed, then of course you’d already be happy instead of depressed.
Here’s what most well-meaning people don’t appreciate: if it’s normal and natural for you to think in stressful, negative ways that make you feel bad, then it feels like you’re always swimming against a powerful current, where your efforts to feel happy just feel exhausting and futile.
So part of learning how to be happy when depressed is removing the powerful, negative current that makes you miserable and depressed in the first place.
How to increase happiness the easy way
Once you’re not dealing with that negative current in your life that makes you feel perpetually miserable and depressed, then it becomes easy to achieve and experience greater happiness.
For this reason, learning how to feel happy with yourself and your life is one of the last (or later) things you’re learning in this course. The idea is that you’ve already learned how to get rid of negative thoughts, how to handle negative emotions intelligently, and how to stop feeling sorry for yourself.
You’ve also learned how to reduce and eliminate stress, anxiety, guilt, regret, self-loathing, low self esteem, lack of self confidence, and feelings of failure.
By doing all this, it’s like you’re no longer swimming against a negative current that naturally makes you miserable and depressed, so now you find it naturally easier to achieve and experience happiness.
In other words, you’ve removed powerful obstacles to happiness, which is why you’ll now find it so much easier to be happier, even if you struggled with experiencing happiness before.
(Indeed, by this point, you might very well already be happy instead of depressed, which is wonderful to appreciate. In this case, just use the information in this lesson to learn how to keep yourself happy consistently.)
How to become happy with yourself in 3 easy steps
Don’t ever waste any time, like many people do, trying to figure out how to trick yourself into being happy or how to pretend to be happy. As you’ll soon see, it’s much easier and far more rewarding to learn how to create genuine happiness, without ever having to fake being happy at all.
Also, from this moment forward, stop thinking of happiness as being something mysterious or inexplicable that comes and goes for no rhyme or reason, and instead think of happiness as being something that is created by the way you think about things.
Specifically, happiness is created by taking the following 3 steps:
- Focus on things of positive value to you (see something of positive value that you can feel happy about in the first place)
- Accept any positive value that you see as good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with it
- See it as ok and great to experience happiness, and allow yourself to feel happy (rather than “blocking” feelings of happiness for whatever reason, like thinking it’s bad or wrong)
How to live a happy life & find happiness within yourself
Maybe you’re thinking: “How can I be happy with myself just by changing my thinking? It can’t be that easy!”
But it is that easy. To appreciate this, if you’re currently unhappy, you are definitely not doing the three steps above that you just learned about. Just take a moment to examine your thoughts, and see and appreciate that for yourself.
Now imagine how much better and happier you would be if you did follow all of those 3 steps above.
This realization helps you appreciate that you naturally create greater happiness in your life by improving the way you think about things. So when people talk about finding happiness within yourself, this is ultimately what they’re talking about.
Indeed, these 3 steps are how to find happiness within yourself by thinking in ways that make you feel happy. And by following these steps, you are guaranteed to feel happy, regardless of how anyone else wants you to feel.
How to be a happier person by seeing positive value in yourself
The first ingredient for happiness is to see something of positive value to be happy about.
Think about it: if you want to be happy with yourself and your life, you’ve got to see something of positive value in yourself and your life for you to enjoy and feel happy about.
You’ve already learned how to do this when you learned how to have high self esteem quickly, since you learned how to see lots of positive value in your past, present, and future.
If you haven’t done this yet, be sure to do it right now, since in order to feel happy, you’ve got to see at least see one thing of positive value in yourself or your life that you can enjoy and feel happy about. The more positive value you see, the better.
This is how to be a happy person in a smart, fast, easy way by being sure to value yourself and your life, even if no one else does.
How to be happy with what you have in life
Hopefully, you already see lots of positive value in your past, present, and future. If you do, that’s great, but you still won’t feel happy with yourself and your life until you accept that positive value as good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with it.
To understand this, consider the common example of someone who “mysteriously” never feels happy, even though he’s got tons of great things to feel happy about, like wonderful personal qualities, great family and friends, and lots of success in life.
The reason for his unhappiness is often this: he doesn’t accept the positive value he sees in his life as good enough for him to be pleased or satisfied with it, which means he is perpetually dissatisfied and unhappy, no matter how many positive things he sees in his life that he could feel happy about.
Apply that lesson to your own life. You can see lots of positive value in yourself, like in your sense of humor, kindness, intelligence, and so on, but if you don’t accept that positive value as already good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with it, you’ll perpetually be unhappy and dissatisfied with yourself, no matter how many great qualities you have.
The great news is that it’s easy for you to accept any positive value that you see as good enough for you to be pleased and satisifed with it, since this is simply a choice you can make, if you want, and you don’t need anyone else’s support, acceptance, or approval to make this choice.
How to be happy with yourself by allowing yourself to feel happy
The final step for feeling happy is learning how to allow yourself to be happy. You do this by accepting feeling happy as being ok and great, rather than blocking this feeling by thinking that it’s bad, wrong, or a sin in any way.
With this step, you’re giving yourself permission to be happy, which allows you to enjoy the actual feeling of happiness inside you. This is important, because if you don’t do this, you’ll never feel happy, no matter how positive value you see and appreciate in your life.
To understand this, consider how you can go to a funeral and see a lot of positive value in your life, and accept that value as good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with it, yet still think it’s wrong for you to be happy at a funeral.
The result is that you won’t feel happy at a funeral, because you’re blocking feelings of happiness. After all, you think it’s bad or wrong for you to feel happy at a funeral, so you’re not allowing yourself to feel happy.
Similarly, you could think of it as bad, wrong, or a sin for you to be pleased and happy with yourself, and as a result, you’ll never feel happy no matter how much positive value you see and accept in your life, because you simply don’t allow yourself to feel happy with yourself.
The big lesson is that if you think it’s bad or wrong in any way for you to be happy, and you don’t allow yourself to feel happy, then you’ll never actually feel happy even if you see tons of positive value that you accept as good enough for you.
The great news is that it’s very easy for you to allow yourself to feel happy by appreciating that it’s always ok, great, and beneficial to feel happy, and to make the choice to always allow yourself to feel happy no matter what, regardless of whether you have anyone else’s permission, acceptance, or approval.
How to be happy with your life: 5 steps
With everything you have learned in this course this far, you have everything it takes to easily feel happy with yourself and your life to some degree, regardless of whether anyone else is happy with you.
And this means that you already have everything it takes to feel happy rather than depressed right now. Let the power of this sink in for a moment.
To be happy with yourself and your life, rather than depressed, be sure to follow these 5 steps:
- Decide that you want to be happy instead of depressed (the importance of doing this was covered earlier in this course, when you learned how to make it your goal to replace depression with happiness)
- Remove obstacles that prevent you from being happy or make it more challenging to experience happiness (like getting rid of negative thoughts, and reducing and eliminating stressful negative emotions; this was covered earlier in this lesson)
- Focus on positive value in yourself and in your life that you can feel happy about (positive value in your past, present, and future)
- Accept any positive value that you see as good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with it
- See it as ok and great to experience happiness, and allow yourself to feel happy (rather than “blocking” feelings of happiness for whatever reason, like thinking it’s bad or wrong)
How to live happy consistently
By following these 5 steps, you can guarantee that you can easily feel happy with yourself and your life to some degree, rather than depressed.
The beauty of doing this is that once you feel happy to some degree (even if it’s just a little happy), you can feel great that you’re not struggling with depression anymore, but instead dealing with happiness.
At this point, it’s simply a matter of following these steps over and over to grow in happiness and stay consistently happy, and to never deal with depression again. Indeed, this is how to remain happy and depression-free the smart way.
Since this is such an important, powerful, beneficial thing to do, make sure to follow these 5 steps right now to feel happy with yourself and your life, and as a result, naturally enjoy being happy and depression-free.
Next: How To Practice Gratitude Daily & Be Happier →
You are here:
Section 10 Lessons:
- How to be happy with yourself
- How to practice gratitude daily & be happier
- Challenge: see yourself as happy and depression-free