How to boost your happiness
What really makes us happy? Are we as happy as we can be? What is the key to lasting happiness? These are questions that most of us think about from time to time. But have you ever stopped to consider how our friends, and friends of our friends, might affect our happiness?
Happiness is contagious according to a Harvard Medical School study. It appears that the more we deal with happy people the happier we will be. But it doesn’t stop there. Research has also found that happiness can jump three degrees of separation. This means that our friends’ friend’s friends can cheer us up, even if we’ve never met them.
“I take care of myself and try to boost up my positive energy. I rely on my strengths. I remind myself that my strengths are my power. I remind myself of my ability to positively or negatively impact others. I choose kindness and try to leave people feeling happier”
So how can a person who we have never met influence our happiness? Well, if we’re in a happy mood we actually boost the chances that someone we know will be happy, and vice versa. This means that there might be some person out there who you have never met who has cheered up one of their friends, who has cheered up one of your friends, who could cheer up you!
The same research also discovered that happiness can spread among friends, neighbours, siblings and spouses. And if we are directly connected to a happy person we are likely to be 15% more happy. Any emotion can be contagious, as by our very nature we somewhat accomodate to the moods of people around us. If we’re around angry people, we might feel anger. Whereas being around upbeat people can make us feel happier.
But what about unhappy people? Is their unhappiness contagious? Well, thankfully happiness appears to be more contagious than unhappiness. According to experts in the field, each additional happy friend that we have can boost our mood by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend can drag us down by only 7 percent. So the moral to this story is being consciously aware of what we are putting out to the people around us.
Specs of Gold
The happiness level of people that we don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from us, can affect our happiness.
Did you know that each extra friend we have reduces the frequency of loneliness by 2 days per year. The average person will feel lonely for 48 days per year.
Contagious laughter: In 1962 in Tanzania an epidemic of laughing spread through many villages resulting in the closing of several schools. This was a “mass psychogenic illness” and was traced to three teenage girls.