Happy people don’t get everything they want, but they want most of they get. Happy people rig the game in their favor by choosing to value things that are within in their grasp. Dr. Glasser, Founder of Choice Psychology states: “Happiness or mental health is enjoying the life you are choosing to live, getting along well with the people near and dear to you, doing something with your life you believe is worthwhile and not doing anything to deprive anyone else of the same chance for happiness you have.”
Researchers have been able to identify core factors in a happy life: number of friends, closeness of friends, closeness of family, and relationship with co-workers & neighbors. Together these explain about 70% of happiness. The other factors of happiness are the ability of people to reframe challenges and setbacks to neutral or positive meanings.
In a study of adult self-esteem, researchers found happy people take defeat & explain it away, treating it as an isolated incident that indicates nothing about their ability. Unhappy people take defeat & enlarge it, making it stand for everything & use it to predict future outcomes. Counselling can help you see defeat in a new way.
Focus Areas for Happiness
- Improve significant relationships in your life. These include your spouse, your parents, your children.
- Develop meaningful friendships. Often it is not about quantity but rather quality. Meaningful friendships make us feel connected and our resources for use to share important values and life events
- Address irrational or rigid thought patterns through counselling. Common but destructive thinking errors that lead to a lower quality of life include: All or nothing thinking, catastrophizing, disqualifying or discounting the positive and magnifying or minimizing positive or negative events. Another toxic thinking pattern is emotional reasoning. This thinking is harmful because you think something must be true because you “feel” it (actually believe it) so strongly, ignoring or discounting evidence to the contrary.
- Find something that you are passionate about and that gives meaning to your life. We all need purpose and meaning in our life that gives us something to look forward too.
- Get your body physically healthy. Eating well and exercise are very important to developing helping. Our stomach are where we produce many of the hormones that help regulate our emotional state. If you put junk into your body you will feel like junk.
Counselling can help you repair important relationship and address thinking errors and destructive belief systems. Happy people are measured by their friendships not their money. If anger, depression or anxiety are getting in the way of making friends or deepening relationships, counselling can help you.
If you are stuck with a bad feeling such as depression, anxiety, grief and sadness and you cannot think your way to a new feeling try acting you way to a new feeling. So get out and about and do something different and pay attention to how your thinking changes and eventually your feelings will change too. Counselling can help you change unhelpful feelings to positive feelings…contact us to find out how.
Our lead therapist, Tammy M. Fontana, has over 10,000 hours of counselling experience dealing with a wide range of personal and internal personal issues. She is a certified choice therapist, a United States Nationally Certified Counsellor and she has achieved her level 2 training in Gottman’s Method for relationship. In addition she has done focused work and training around attachment and trauma, especially in interpersonal trauma resulting from rape, incest and sexual abuse. Contact her to find out how she might be able to help you.
All in the Family Counselling
www.allinthefamilycounselling.com
Tel: 9030 7239
20 Malacca Street, Level 9 Malacca centre
MRT: Raffles PLace