Lifestyle security

Welcome to the home of happy-247.com greeting each day

with a smile

I hope you enjoy looking around my website and blog. I’ve tried to mix some happy, humorous and uplifting items with some practical ideas on how to maintain a happy lifestyle and a secure and prosperous future. – Tony Manning-Stanley

Tony Manning-Stanley

What is happiness?

A general dictionary definition is “Happiness is a state of being characterised by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy”, but how do we obtain such a state of being and why do some of us find it a lot easier to ‘be happy’ than others? Most of us have experienced the state of happiness associated with a particular event in our lives – our wedding, the birth of a child or to some experiencing their football team win the championship are events that can be savoured, never to be forgotten, to lift our spirits in future. So true happiness is a state of being and must come from within. It is not the external events in our lives, but how we react to them and whether we allow them to affect us.

Happy 24/7?

We spend about a third of our day asleep, so unless we have blissful dreams every night and spend all day on cloud nine its a big ask to be ‘happy 24/7′  but the climbing of a mountain needs the first step forward and just small changes to our behaviour and lifestyle can benefit us enormously. The first step is to choose to focus on the positive events within our control  in our lives and to concentrate our thoughts on them. This is inceasingly difficult nowadays when the media seem dedicated to scaremongering and feeding a stream of continuous negativity, the fact is we cannot control worldwide events but we could make someone’s day with just a friendly smile.

What benefits?

• Happy people attract happy events and people to them
  
• Being happy improves our self-esteem and confidence
• Happiness is a mental state that has a positive effect on our physical wellbeing
• Happiness gives us a feeling of  engagement with life and our fellow beings
• We can choose to be happy but we can’t control media events

Practical happiness!

So what can we do about raising our levels of happiness now without carrying a false smile all day?

• Turn off the TV, especially the main news channels. If you are affected by the current global downturn, do something positive to give you control of your own situation. Look for home-working opportunities or crafts that can save money – many people have turned a hobby or activity they enjoy into a profitable business and the internet makes this even more easy to do.

• Find a physical activity that you can do to exercise yourself for at least 30 minutes for 3 days a week. If you find jogging and going to the gym boring, as I do, there’s  swimmimg, aerobics, and dance classes, and depending on your current fitness level a game of golf, tennis or squash will help. All these are participation activities which help you connect with like-minded people, but if your finances don’t allow for any of these, there are home-based excercise programmes you can do which still get your adrenalin flowing.

• Gardening is an activity which can work on many levels. You get exercise from the laying out and preparation and tending to plants can be very therapeutic and if you include vegatables in your patch you can benefit from the enjoyment of being self-sufficient whilst benefitting your finances too.

• Conversation with a like-minded partner or friend can be a great way to improve your mood, especially if you share a similar sense of humour, you can have a good laugh and come away feeling happy and contented.

• Small gifts of kindness to others can benefit you as much as them, by making you feel better about yourself. By giving you open up the channels for receiving and you don’t have to equate this to money. Time, skills, and company are valuable assets some of us have to spare at no cost to ourselves other than the effort involved.

• Don’t forget to give yourself a treat now and again too! If you are a person who sets goals for themselves, especially, by promising to reward yourself with a treat you can manage when you reach the next step towards your goal, this will give you a spur onward as well as keeping you focused on your next goals.

• Remind yourself how lucky you already are, its easy to forget in these depressing times that we have a lot to be thankful for and by focussing on that its possible to keep positive about the future.

• Last but not least, the gift of a genuine smile can radiate happiness to others and the feeling invoked when smiling makes it impossible to feel negative at the same time (and it costs nothing!!)

Happy blogging!

As my blog develops I hope to cover everything related to bringing at least a smile and hopefully some more practical information on how to develop a happy lifestyle and secure future.

My blogs areas of interest:

• Fitness & health
• Self-development
• Humour
• Wellbeing
• Planning & organising
• Working from home
• Empowerment

Influences: Deepak Chopra; Wayne Dyer; The Barefoot Doctor; Joe Vitale; Nightingale Conant.

Please feel free to leave comments, your constructive feedback will help me when choosing content for future posts.

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