6 Daily Happiness Hacks

How and why I'm actively working toward being a happier person.

I’m not, by nature, a happy-go-lucky person. If I’m being totally transparent, my emotional baseline errs heavily on the melancholic side, and the last 5-ish years have been filled with a series of fairly significant, ongoing personal challenges which have only exacerbated my depressive tendencies. I’m neither complaining nor seeking sympathy; I know that this is, unfortunately, part of life. No one escapes the hard stuff, so inevitably, happiness can feel elusive, or at best, temporary. It can be especially difficult to cope when there’s no end in sight or obvious solution to the primary source(s) of your unhappiness.

“Is lasting happiness even possible?” I pondered this question on one of my recent walks during a particularly trying week. I wasn’t ready to accept that it could be an indeterminate period of time before all of the issues in my life resolve, at which point I might (?) feel better again - life is too short! I have so much to be grateful for (and I really do), and being sad mutes all the good stuff. Yet, even if we do manage to crawl out of the muck, how long can it really last before something else grabs us by the ankles and drags us back down?

We all know people who are genuinely content, joyful even, despite having their fair share of sad/painful/difficult things to deal with. That day on my walk, I vowed to find ways to bring more happiness into my life and sustain it, even though it will nearly always have to exist alongside hardship, too. Since then, I’ve come to realize that happiness is not a passive experience - for most of us, it takes some degree of ongoing effort. Here are the hacks that I’ve been relying on lately to generate more happiness in my life: