How to Feel Happier Right This Moment
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The next time you’re having a case of the Mondays (even on a Wednesday) try one of these five simple strategies for feeling happier in a matter of minutes.
By Elizabeth Angel and Lois B. Morris
Smile.
Annie was onto something: If your face looks happy, your mood might catch up with it. “When people are in negative moods, they fixate,”says Kareem J. Johnson, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Positive emotions help them do the opposite: see the big picture.” Notably, people in one study he conducted didn’t need to be generally cheerful in order to reap these benefits; the effects resulted simply from smiling.
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Eat right.
That bag of Sour Patch Kids isn’t actually making you as happy as you think it is. A study led by Felice N. Jacka, a scientist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, found that a Western-style diet—featuring primarily processed meats, pizza, fried foods, white bread, sugar, and beer—increased the odds of depression by 52 percent. Surprisingly, a diet of fruit, salad, fish, tofu, beans, nuts, yogurt, and red wine didn’t seem to help prevent poor mood either. What did was a diet of vegetables, fruit, grass-fed meat, fish, and whole grains—an eating pattern that reduced the odds of depression and anxiety disorders by 35 percent and 32 percent, respectively.
Exercise. No, really.
Aerobic exercise may do as much to counteract depression as a prescription antidepressant, says Madhukar Trivedi, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. In a study he led, sedentary people who were depressed despite taking medication tried a supervised exercise program as they kept taking their pills. Using treadmills or stationary bikes, they did the equivalent of walking four miles per hour for 210 minutes weekly (high intensity) or three miles per hour for 75 minutes weekly (moderate intensity). After 12 weeks, about 30 percent of the people in both groups were no longer depressed, and an additional 20 percent showed improvement. For women, the intense exercise appeared more effective if they had no family history of depression, while those who did were likely to stick with the less-vigorous regimen.
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Get by with a little help from your friends.
“There is one factor that is universally associated with happiness,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf). “The extent and quality of a person’s social relationships are highly correlated with happiness. For instance, when I ask people I know which they’d rather lose, their friends or their eyesight, they think long and hard about it. But they shouldn’t. Most blind people are perfectly happy, while friendless people are unhappy. Spend as much time as possible with your friends and family, and those relationships will sustain you.”
Try not to overreact.
“As a rule, we tend to think negative events are going to make us feel really bad for a really long time,” says Gilbert. “If you ask people to predict how they would feel if they were to lose a limb or a lover or a job, they expect to be devastated, and they expect that devastation to endure. But research shows that even the worst events make us feel bad for a relatively short time. We’re very good at finding new ways to think about the world once things don’t go our way.”
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