Friday, I shared Five Surprising Facts About Happiness.    Well, most people tell us all this is great, but who has the time to work on being happier? These days we can barely make it to the gym, let alone add on a set of “happiness exercises.”  But there are easy, quick things we can do each day to become happier that take maybe five minutes, even less.

•    Do at least one thing per day completely.  By that, I mean, experience it fully, without going off into your head and thinking about what you need to do later, what you’re worried might happen, or whether whatever you are doing is a good use of your time.  Just do it, and savor it.  It can be anything – a meal, your shower, even a conversation – and you don’t have to plan it in advance.  What’s more important is that you pick something you usually rush through or do distractedly and instead be completely present while you are doing it.

•    Every night, reflect on the things that went well that day.  We have all sorts of cognitive biases that make it easy to forget good things, or let bad things overshadow them.  We have to work hard to keep them from disappearing from our memory altogether, and one of the quickest, easiest ways to do that is to set a specific time to remember (and maybe even record) them.  Happier.com has created an iPhone application called the “gratitude journal” that records your bright spots during the day and tracks your happiness “quotient”.  You can do it in just a few minutes a day.

•    Experiment with your daily routine.  Develop some ideas about what makes you happy and what makes you unhappy and see if you’re right.  Keep a log of what you do each day and what your mood is throughout the day, and see what factors make a difference.  You’d be surprised how often the things we do because we think they are helping us actually make things worse, and how often things we think are unimportant have a huge impact.

For additional tools and strategies to increase your happiness, try the happiness plans on happier.com.

Decrease Your Symptoms of Stress, Anxiety and Depression

Increase Your Happiness and Positive Emotions

Build Positive Emotions

Increase Your Resilience

Discover Your Strengths

Have you tried these strategies?  What worked for you?  What would you recommend to others?  Feel free to leave comments at the end of this post.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Not Just the Kitchen.

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