Happiness Matters- Change your mind...

Your happiness matters. Tonight we have our second installment of our new Happiness Segments. Our first week we committed to changing our focus and actually smiling and saying hello to strangers, as a means of enhancing our life as well as others. Let’s discuss how that assignment went for our audience.

What was the response to the first segment on smiling?
• Anonymous: Just smiling changed everything for me
• Ron said: I’d like to put those smiley faces everywhere in my office. I think it would change everyone’s outlook
• Ella said: Loved the assignment and even called people to say hello
• The newsroom. Everyone got a kick out of the smiley faces and they all seemed to smile more and laugh just by seeing the smile
So what element of happiness are we looking at tonight?
• Tonight we are looking at the correlation of Happiness & age.
• A 2008 study of 28,000 people from ages 18-88 showed that older Americans are happiest
• Older people are more content with what they have than younger people
• Older people have lower expectations and accept their own achievements
• 2009 study from University of California showed that older people tend to avoid stress leading to less negative emotions.
• Older adults tend to spend more time thinking about past happy events than negative events.
• Most importantly **** the odds of being happy increases 5% with every 10 years of age.
Wow, it sounds like older people may have some real techniques related to happiness. So what is our Happiness Matters assignment for tonight?
• Older people have lower expectations and tend to think in terms of optimism or happier events versus having negative thoughts
• COMMIT: Try to focus on the things that are going well in your life. Commit to trying to change your inner message by focusing on the happy events in your life. Each night before bed make mental note of 5 positive events in your day. Do this for a week and you’ll discover you have raised your happiness ratio! Learn from those who know—focusing on happy events lowers your stress level, changes your outlook, and changes your world!!