Happiness is a Choice

No matter how tough or difficult your life is I believe that happiness is a choice.  You can get up each morning and decide whether you choose to be happy or not.

So many of us are running on autopilot these days, sometimes struggling with the stress of every day life that we don't monitor our emotions, our feelings or our self talk.

At the end of the day we all want to be happy.  No matter what you are striving for in life whether it be money, a successful career, a sports car or a family, we are motivated to strive to reach these goals because we all want to be happy yet many of us reach these goals and realize that when we achieve these things we are still not happy.

Happiness is a choice you make.  You can either look around your life and see what all you don't have or you can look around and see all of what you do have.  It's your choice, simple as that.

I know a lady many years ago who was trying to lose weight.  She was really determined to lose the weight and little by little she started to shed those pounds through healthy eating and increasing her exercise level.  When I saw her a few months later she had shed almost 100 pounds, yet she still wasn't satisfied.

I asked her how she felt and how proud she must be losing all the weight and she looked at me and said "You know I thought all I needed to do was lose weight and I would become happier as a result but now I am reaching my goal, I just look in the mirror and feel empty.  I have came to realize that my happiness needs to come from the inside."

Many people fail to realize this simple fact.  They chase goals all their life believing that the goal is going to make them happy but that is just not how it works.  Being happy is a choice.  Happiness comes when you practice and recognize when you are happy.

You have to remember how happiness feels to you before you can bring it back into your life by choice.  Happiness is that moment when you feel yourself smiling, with joyous thoughts that flood you heart with a surge of pleasure.  That moment when you wish you could freeze time at just that moment because it feels so blissfully good.

All too often we forget those happy moments and how they felt.  We forget to look back and recapture that moment captured in your memory.  We forget to look around each day and find the happiness in each day.  The pleasure of simply living.  Think about it, life is amazing no matter what you are going through there is always a way you can brighten your day by choosing to remember what happy feels like to you.

Ignore how the media defines happiness. It tries to imply to you through subliminal messages what happiness should look like to you and how you need to look and what you need to buy to be happy.  Ignore all that and start to remember how happiness feels to you.  How it makes you feel inside.  Take that feeling and carry it forward into each day of your life.  Happiness is a choice you make.  That small feeling that can erupt into such a burst of joy, like you can conquer the world!  

Be mindful of how you start each day, are you on autopilot or are you choosing to start each day being happy.  When you are smiling the world smiles back!!