How to Be Happy: A Happiness Checklist for Revamping Your Life

True happiness does not lie on the other side of what you want; your happiness is never about that one thing, and it never will be, for happiness is never a one-time thing, but an all-time thing.

Happiness takes practice. Happiness is a lifestyle. The happy life is not the easy life. Strangely enough, the pursuit of happiness will not always make you feel happy.

How to Be Happy: The Theory

Based on authentic happiness theory, happiness can be analyzed using three elements that we choose for their own sake: positive emotions, engagement, and meaning.

To the extent that you have these three things, you’ll experience more happiness in your life.

1. Positive emotions

Positive emotions include pleasant or desirable situational responses, which can be triggered by something as simple as eating ice cream, or something as complex as feeling a deep sense of compassion toward another person.

Positive emotions include joy, optimism, contentment, and the like. This is the typical idea people have of happiness, and it’s only one layer of what it truly entails.

2. Engagement

Engagement means being deeply involved and absorbed in a task. This is when you are so invested and enraptured by what you’re doing that time flies. In other words, these are your flow activities: the things that absorb you so deeply that you end up performing at your best and feeling at your best.

3. Meaning and Purpose

Meaning comes when you do something bigger than yourself. This could range from raising children, all the way up to transforming your local community or changing the whole world.

So what can you do to ensure that you have enough of these three things? Practice. Practice. Practice.

The Practice

You can download the TCK Happiness Checklist here. You can use this checklist as a reference to remind you of the practices listed below.

Cultivate Positive Emotions

1. Create a gratitude journal.

Many studies suggest that gratitude makes us happier and rewires our brains positively. The more you practice gratitude, the easier it is for you to notice things to be grateful for in your life.

You can check out our post for some ideas on how to start your gratitude journal, but feel free to explore other techniques that work for you. The point is to be grateful.

2. Praise someone.

In Big Potential, Shawn Achor explains, “The more praise you give, the more praise you will deserve and receive.”

Take a minute or two each day to write a text, a letter, or a note to offer genuine praise. If your coworker is doing something you find praiseworthy, never hesitate to say it.

Offering praise to others improves their motivation and performance, and it also makes it more likely that they will praise you back. Instead of having a culture of complaining and negativity, this creates a virtuous cycle in which your own social environment focuses on the praiseworthy and positive behaviors.

The more you practice noticing the praiseworthy, the more you’ll find it.

3. Perform a kind act.

Do something kind for others today. Do some free service for your loved ones. Share your food. Offer help to your coworker. Donate your unused stuff to those in need. Volunteer for a nonprofit organization and help the community.

We are rewarded by our kindness. Not only by others, but by our brains as well.

4. Meditate.

Look for a meditation practice that you find compelling and schedule out a time-block in your calendar to practice it daily.

The practices of meditation and mindfulness, as well as self-compassion, are strongly correlated with happiness. It will also increase your daily experience of positive emotions, which in turn reduces depression and increases life satisfaction.

5. Identify the noise, then eliminate it by at least 5%.

While it is necessary to do the things that add to your happiness, it is just as important to eliminate the barriers that prevent you from experiencing positivity.

In Shawn Achor’s book Before Happiness, he defined four criteria to help you identify noise in your life:

Unusable: Your behavior will not be altered by the information.

Untimely: You are not going to use that information imminently, and it could change by the time you use it.

Hypothetical: It is based on what someone believes “could be” instead of “what is.”

Distracting: It distracts you from your goals.

Eliminating noise does not mean blocking all negativity from your life; it means reducing what is irrelevant. It is all right to suffer for the things you find worthy of suffering for; but spending two hours watching videos on Youtube probably isn’t.

Reduce your social media consumption. While it connects you with your loved ones, social media can be a source of distress and anxiety. Unless you’re a social media manager, using social media simply distracts you from your goals, gives you unusable information, and is mostly untimely. In other words, noise.

Here are other practical steps to help you reduce the noise in your life:

Remove social media apps from your phone. You can still use them on your desktop or phone browser, but this little inconvenience makes a big difference.
Write down a list of your priorities (everything from professional to social) so you know when a piece of information is unusable or untimely. If something is unrelated to your projects, responsibilities, or goals, there’s a good chance it’s noise.
Stop using your phone two hours before going to sleep. Not only will this cut the noise, but it will also improve your sleep quality.
Mute the audio in your car for 15 minutes before playing anything or listening to the radio.
Spend less time watching TV or Netflix.
Have a digital detox day once a week. Take a break from your phone or any digital devices and go outside.
Write a “Quit” list. More likely, you’re already doing something that adds significant noise in your life. Use the four criteria above and eliminate what’s on the list as thoroughly as possible.
Set up your technology to avoid distractions:
- Use the “Do Not Disturb” or “Focus Mode” feature on your phone when working, so you don’t get unnecessary or distracting notifications.
- Delete games from your phone. You can always download them again when you really want (and have the time) to play. This slight change will help inhibit your impulse to play.
- Use Facebook Feed Eradicator so you don’t see a newsfeed when you open Facebook. Your newsfeed is designed to make you stay there and keep scrolling. If you ever intended to quickly check Facebook, then looked up two hours later, you know what I’m talking about.
- Block websites that lead to mindless browsing (you can always enable them when you aren’t working).
- Use Unroll.me to unsubscribe from unnecessary emails. Anything irrelevant is noise.

Be Engaged

1. Identify your signature strengths

Identifying your signature strengths will help you know what to work on to get the most results.

It is easier to do the things that you’re already good at. It’s better than trying to live your life fixing your weaknesses. There’s a reason why something is your weakness. And while you can fix that with some effort and time, you should begin by utilizing your strengths.

You can find your signature strengths in this 15-minute questionnaire. Upon completion, you’ll get a ranked list of your signature strengths with your core strength at the top.

2. List your flow activities and identify your flow profile.

Recall a time when you found yourself lost in enjoyment and hours seemed to fly by while doing something. Maybe it’s when you began playing basketball and suddenly realized the first quarter was over so quickly; or when you began writing your article in the morning and noticed that it’s lunch time already. There are many ways that you can experience this engagement. It is that moment when you feel your best and do your best. That is flow.

According to the Flow Genome Project, there are four different flow types: the deep thinker, the crowd pleaser, the hard goer, and the flow goer. You can take the test to find out your Flow profile here. It’s a short quiz that you can complete in as little as 3 minutes. Upon completion, you will receive recommendations on how you can add flow activities to your life based on your flow type.

Identifying your flow type will help you complement it with your signature strengths so you can stack together what you’re good at and what engages you deeply.

3. Design your life around these flow activities.

Once you’ve found what makes you tick, the next step is to design your life around those activities. Either make it a hobby that you engage in often or choose a career that revolves around these activities.

If you enjoy writing, work as a novelist, blogger, or copywriter. If you like yoga, then try to earn an instructor certificate and share your passion with the world. If you love socializing, participate in social or political causes, become an influencer, or play a group sport.

If you’re looking for a career where you are more likely to excel and be the best at, look at your highest flow activities.

Flow and high performance are a package deal; where there is flow, excellence follows. When you experience flow, mental and physical performance go through the roof. In fact, a 10-year study by McKinsey shows that business executives who have more access to flow are 500% more productive than their non-flow peers.

By not accessing flow, you are losing out to your top competitors. The person in flow has achieved on Monday what you would’ve achieved five days hence. The gap this creates over the years is huge. The non-flow players ultimately lose.

Take a moment and think seriously about your activities. The quality of your life hangs in the balance. You’ll have a more engaged life and a satisfying career over the years if you can set up your life to have more flow.

Note: It is possible to have more than one flow profile, and it is also possible to learn or adopt the others. Pursuing a path that isn’t your main flow profile is not necessarily wrong; the point is to do more of your highest flow activities.

Find Meaning and Purpose

You can eat the finest food in the world, meditate all day long, or play chess by yourself and puzzle about the infinite possibilities of a 64-square board; but none of this would be enough unless you share your life with others.

Do you want to live a happy, but meaningless life? That sounds like a self-contradiction. Because it is. If you only think of happiness as an individual pursuit, you are doomed to fail. It’s not all about you.

One of the most interesting investigations of life’s meaning that I’ve found comes from a show called Rick and Morty, where even the smartest scientist in the multi-verse cannot seem to find an answer to the meaning of life.

While I will not recommend the exact things you must do to find meaning in your life, there are certain questions that you need to answer in order to find it out: who, what, and why.

Who do you want to serve? What service will you provide to them? Why?

I leave it up to you to figure out what gives you meaning, and how you go about answering this question. There’s no right or wrong answer. And this is not the only way to the quest for meaning. But once you found it, after all the searching, testing, experimenting… commit.

Commit yourself to this worthy cause you have chosen. Serve your “who” with the best possible “what” you can provide.

And your “why”? Let it serve as your fuel. It will be a long and winding road ahead.

Achieving Happiness

To live your life only looking for ways to feel good is to live it only with positive emotions. That’s not enough.

You must be engaged. You must find meaning and purpose. But being truly engaged means you’ll have to do difficult things. It’s not at all fun. You’ll have to go to training even though you want to sleep more; you’ll have to do the same thing again and again so you don’t mess it up in the big game; you’ll have to play against better opponents and get your ass kicked just to get better at whatever you have chosen.

And the same goes for finding meaning and purpose. When you do things bigger than yourself, you will inevitably face challenges that you otherwise wouldn’t have to face. It means less time watching TV, less time partying with friends, and less time doing the easy and comfortable things. You’ll have to give up the things holding you back from fully serving and contributing to whatever gives you meaning. All these are demanding and difficult endeavors.

The road to happiness, it seems, is fraught with discomfort and difficulties. So when they arrive—and surely they will—remember the words of Baruch Spinoza: “Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”

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