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According to psychologists, happiness comes down to the number of positive and negative moment that we experience.

Whether a moment is positive or negative depends entirely on how we feel. So, for example, if you feel relaxed, excited, joyful, or peaceful, then you’re experiencing a positive moment. On the other hand, if you are bored, angry, or annoyed, then you’re experiencing a negative moment.

Our overall satisfaction with life, or “happiness score,” is simply the number of positive moments that we experience divided by the number of negatives ones. So the more frequently you experience positive emotions, the happier you are. […]

1. Happiness Is Valuing Our Emotions

[…] If you want to be happy, the first thing to do is to become mindful of your emotions. It isn’t hard: simply try to pay attention to how you feel at varies point in the day.

When you are practicing mindfulness, don’t try to change or control your emotions in any way. All you need to do is become aware of what they are and acknowledge them. […]

2. Happiness is Loving Your Job

We spend so much of our time at work. And we factor in commute time, and the time it takes to regenerate ourselves after work, then hardly anything at all is left.

When we don’t like our job, we collect so many moments of boredom and frustration that it becomes almost impossible to shift the balance in our favor. It is very hard to maintain a high ratio of positive to negative moments when we spend our days disliking what we do.

However, disking our jobs is all too common. A whooping 80% of people dislike theirs! […]

3. Happiness is A Good Relationship

[…] If you are currently single, choose a partner that will brings into your life many positive moments, and few bad ones. Pay close attention to how you feel around potential partners, and choose one who consistently makes you feel good.

If you are already in a relationship, know that whatever investment you make in your relationship, is also an investment in your own happiness. It is not possible to avoid all problems – rough patches are inedible in long term relationships. When problems do come up – don’t ignore then. Work through your relationship difficulties, so that your relationship can once again contribute to your overall happiness.

And when times are good, cherish your relationship. It is bringing more joy into your life than you may realize.

Here’s the abstract of this lengthy, but interesting, research paper:

The current study investigated whether fiction experiences change empathy of the reader. Based on transportation theory, it was predicted that when people read fiction, and they are emotionally transported into the story, they become more empathic. Two experiments showed that empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story. No transportation led to lower empathy in both studies, while study 1 showed that high transportation led to higher empathy among fiction readers. These effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction. The study showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader, but only under the condition of low or high emotional transportation into the story.

“Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest.” ~Sri Chinmoy

The points below really helped me to come to terms with how judgmental people can be.

1. The only person who can know the absolute truth about you is you. […]

2. Ultimately, the opinion that really matters is yours. […]

3. People can’t “make” you feel anything. […]

4. Someone else’s judgment will be far more important to you. […]

5. We don’t need to try to read people’s minds. […]

6. Forgiveness sets you free. […]

7. Compassion changes everything. […]

I hope you never find yourself being unfairly judged, or indeed forming an opinion of your own without all the facts, but if you do I hope my story can help you.

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.

Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.