How to be Happy

Dated: date January 5, 2011 – 1:01 pm

There’s a fallacy that says if you work really hard right now and make lots of money, then you’ll be able to make yourself happy. It doesn’t work that way. So, what if you will make a lot of money and you get to the place where you envision. Oh, the clouds part, the sun is shining through, and there’s angels singing, and there’s harps playing. But you’re still be unhappy. Why? Because happiness is a skill. Happiness is not something that is externally located. So although you can get momentary hits of happiness through external things, ultimately, the long-term happiness comes from you implementing a set of skills.

For example, gratitude is a very important skill in maintaining happiness. Appreciation is a very important skill for implementing happiness in your life. Other important skills for happiness include forgiveness, acceptance and acknowledgement. These are skills that you must learn and take on. Another skill that you should learn is honoring yourself. Yet another skill is saying, “No.”

These are all things that will help you to be happy long term. You must take on the skills of happiness. You’re never going to make enough money to be happy. And I know this because I literally work with some of the wealthiest people in the world, and as I’m working with them, I can tell you, they’re flying around their private jet, not happy, until I teach them the skills of happiness, and then, suddenly, they are happy relatively all the time.

It’s important to mention that you’ll never be happy all the time. In fact, if you were, you wouldn’t even know you were happy. You need the contrast in order to know you’re happy. So, stop working so that some day you can be happy, and instead, practice being happy now, while doing the work that you’re doing. And by the way, you’ll be more effective at the work you do, too.

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Being Healthy Can Help Make You Happy

Dated: date January 3, 2011 – 4:08 pm

It’s hard to be happy when you’re not healthy. When you are feeling physically down, it’s difficult to experience happiness. It takes a tremendous amount of work. And so, what I recommend for people to be happy is to take their MEDS. MEDS is an acronym for meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep.

See, people who meditate every single day actually engage the pituitary glad. The pituitary gland is where HGH is released into your body, which gives you all kinds of good feelings. It’s shown that people who meditate are more relaxed. They’re more peaceful, and when you’re relaxed and peaceful, it’s a lot easier to be happy.

Exercise is known to release endorphins into your body, and dopamine, both of which make you feel incredible. They make you feel high, and people just want to feel high. They want to feel up and elevated.

You have to get your diet to the right place! When you have a bad diet, you keep knocking yourself into a downer state. Too much sugar, for example, is going to cause you to go up for a moment, and then nose dive. Too much caffeine, too much fat, too much of anything, really, is what can cause problems, so finding that combination that works for you is going to be absolutely critical.

And then, sleep – you need to figure out what your sleep cycle is. There’s a great app on the iPhone for sleep cycles that helps you to understand what your rhythms are, and helps you to wake up effectively. But I’d recommend that you figure out what works right for you. For me, it’s about seven and a half hours. I have some people, though, who literally need to sleep nine and a half or ten hours for them to feel good. And so, we just rearrange life to be able to fit that kind of sleep in. Some people are lucky. They can do five or six hours of sleep. Everybody’s different. You need to find out for yourself what it is, and then, you’ve got to stick to a regimen where you are getting the sleep that you need.

Meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep.

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Having a Job Does Not Make You Happy

Dated: date December 29, 2010 – 9:30 am

Getting a job will not make you happy. I know many of you think that it will, but it won’t. In fact, I was reading a survey done by Deliotte Shift. It was a index survey, and they discovered that eight percent of the people who are employed today are dissatisfied with their job. Why? Because happiness is not a set of circumstances, happiness is a skill set that you take on. It’s a set of disciplines. It’s a discipline of being optimistic. That’s a discipline.

How do you implement being optimistic? You have to being to notice that the mind, which I call the drunk monkey in your head, is focused 100 percent on trying to keep you safe in situations that are not even dangerous. It’s trying to analyze what danger might come, so it’s focused on everything negative.

I was just reading an article published by Harvard University and their psychology department. They put out an iPhone app which had 2200 people give status updates on what their mood was in that moment, and what they were doing. And they received 250,000 status updates. And then, they analyzed them.

You know what they found? They found that people were the most unhappy when they let their thoughts wander, meaning when they were not focusing their thoughts on something, their mind defaulted to negativity that made them unhappy. Now, this is not new news. It’s just exciting that someone is validating it.

Your mind is not your friend. It doesn’t like you. It’s not interested in you. It’s not interested in your happiness. The mind is, number one, there to survive. It wants to steer you away from danger, so it’s going to look for those things that are potentially dangerous and negative, and focus on them. That’s going to make you unhappy because the truth is you have a relatively good life.

And yes, you may not have a job right now, and yes, you will get a job. But you’re not going to get a job if you’re a stinky jerk. You’re not gonna get a job if you’re negative, and pissed off, and freaking out, and dissatisfied. You need to start practicing principles that are going to get you into a happy and optimistic state.

And by getting into a happy and optimistic state, you’re going to feel better. When you feel better, you’re more attractive. You’re more resourceful. You’re more creative. You’re more engaging. You’re more charming. They key here is to feel good now.

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5 Steps to Eliminate Stress

Dated: date December 28, 2010 – 5:06 pm

There are five steps that I say will help you to eliminate your anxiety. After working with more than 8,000 people and coaching them on a weekly basis to live in states of happiness and peace, and succeed at the highest levels, I can tell you, I’ve dealt with a lot of people with anxiety.

First thing that you need to do, number one, is to remember to breathe. If you’re feeling some anxiety right now, just breathe. I just want you to take a deep breath in through your nose, and hold it. And I want you to push out your stomach. And then blow it out slowly. And let’s take another deep breath in right now. Hold it. Push your stomach way out, just really push you stomach out. Blow all that – get all of that anxiety out of there, and then blow. Just that right there will start to bring a little relief.

The second thing to help you to relieve your anxiety is to write out the worst-case scenario. What that means is your the mind, the drunk monkey, is turning and turning saying “Oh my God, what are we gonna do?” Most anxiety comes from the drunk monkey in your head prophesying a negative future, and the truth is, the negative future is probably not coming the way that the drunk monkey says, so you need to write it out. Write out exactly what the drunk monkey is saying in your head. Write out the worst-case scenario. And go all the way down to the deepest, darkest moments, and then write an action plan for what you would do once you went to that worst case.

You’ll find that writing it out brings you a tremendous amount of relief. The third thing is exercise. If you will exercise and just get out there and move, even just go out and take a walk, it’s going to relieve some stress. Even doing some push-ups, some sit-ups, or going up and down your stairs if it’s too cold outside. Just getting your heart pumping will start to relieve some stress.

The fourth thing is to actually meditate, to actually just take some time, meditate, prayer, contemplate, whatever word you use for that, just take some time. Close your eyes, and just take some deep breaths, and get into a different zone, and do it until the mind stops. The mind is just going to go, and go, and go, and go, and go, and go. And then, eventually, you’re gonna go into some altered state. Now, you may consider utilizing one of the meditations that I have. Go to MatthewFerry.com to track down some of the meditations that I do, or go to iTunes, and download them there. Or you can just go free form.

The fifth one is to just see the mind for what it is. So your mind is trying to protect you, and that’s your mind’s job. All the talking in your head is trying to keep you safe. The issue is that you’re not really in a dangerous situation. Most of the time, the anxiety and stress you’re experiencing is more about embarrassment, or it’s more about not fitting in. It’s some trigger that is not really real.

So just practice seeing the mind trying to protect you, and just realize there is not actually a dangerous situation. There’s no need for you to be freaking out right now. Try those things, and notice what a powerful difference it will in getting you back to a place of peace and ease.

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You Are Not a Psychic

Dated: date December 22, 2010 – 3:37 pm

If you want to be happy, then you need to stop pretending that you’re psychic. You need to quit pretending that you can look at the outside of people and see who they are. You can’t. You have no idea who people are. You look at someone and you think, “Oh, that’s what that person is.” And then, they do something different, it breaks your expectations.

When your expectations get broken, you feel anxiety, and stress, and you may even feel anger and hostility. It messes with your emotions. You need to quit pretending that you’re psychic. You’re not psychic. You can’t tell who people are. You also can’t tell what the future is.

And yet, so often, you are thinking, “Well, the future’s going to be like this.” And then, when it’s not like that, you’re depressed, disappointed, upset, and angry. You’re not psychic. You don’t know how the future is going to be. However the world turns out is how it turns out.

And your opinion about it isn’t going to change it. All your opinion will cause you is suffering. If you want to begin to experience more happiness, more joy, more peace in your life, consider giving up that you know how it’s all going to turn out. Consider giving up that you know how people are supposed to be. You don’t.

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The Spiritual Drunk Monkey

Dated: date December 20, 2010 – 5:09 pm

A client writes in, ” Sometimes I get impatient when people don’t get it (ie. They assume things, are negative…don’t think like me)…how can I become better at understanding people?? My ego gets out of whack when it wants to impose its beliefs about how things should be onto others…when my true self knows there is no right or wrong.”

I call this the spiritual Drunk Monkey. Once you become a spiritual person you put less weight in what The Drunk Monkey says so it becomes spiritual in order to get your attention again.

Your judgement is a futile attempt at surviving longer by trying to be better or fix what is broken. See The Drunk Monkey for what it is; a biological mechanism that protects you from threats that don’t exist.

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