Make Yourself Happy

"You can make yourself happy, or you can make yourself miserable," observes psychologist Mark Shepard in The Optimist (November 2012).  "The amount of effort is the same.  So if it takes the same amount of effort, why not make yourself happy?"

Shepard offers this technique to make yourself happy:

"Anxious about something that hasn't happened yet?  You might simply be envisioning a terrible outcome instead of a positive one.  Imagine you're in the future, after the event you're anxious about has taken place.  Look back into the past, and see that event resolving in an even better way than you've been able to imagine.  You've simply expanded the frame of what's possible.  More often than not, your anxiety will become serenity or even excitement.  You might even find yourself looking forward to something you dreaded."

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