The Happier Method™
Your emotional fitness, well-being, and happiness are SKILLS you can improve through practice. The Happier Method helps you do it!
The Happier Method™
Life is full of challenges. But you can struggle less through those challenges and thrive more in work and life. This is what the Happier Method is all about.
The Happier Method helps you improve your emotional health, well-being, and resilience by practicing emotional fitness skills and cultivating a more supportive relationship with yourself, your thoughts and emotions, and other people.
Backed by science, it's practical, accessible, and created for real people, with busy lives and many responsibilities. (Aka you can practice it as part of your daily work and life.)
The foundation (a mini neuroscience lesson)
We need to start with bad news: Your brain doesn't care about your well-being or happiness. It's main job is to keep you safe from danger (which is helpful because staying alive is awesome.)
Because your brain is always searching for possible danger — real or imagined! — it's developed certain tendencies that cause you stress, worry, or let your self-critic get in the way. Here are 3 of them you need to know:
- Negativity bias: Your brain over-focuses on anything negative and ignores many positive moments and experiences if they are familiar
- Fear of uncertainty: Uncertainty is your brain's least favorite thing (because it makes it really hard to do its main job), so it makes up negative, worst-case scenarios stories to give itself a false sense of certainty
- Default thinking patterns: You see things not as they are, but as your brain believes they are based on its previous experience (which might not be relevant at all!)
The great news is that you can shift your thoughts when they cause you to struggle, stress, or prevent you from doing what's meaningful to you. You are the editor of your thoughts! And with practice, you can develop a more supportive relationship with your thoughts, your emotions, yourself and others -- which will help you struggle less through challenges and have more energy and capacity to devote to what is meaningful to you!
This is what the Happier Method helps you do!
3 Core Principles of the Happier Method
- Challenge is constant, but struggle is optional. Big or small, challenges are an inevitable part of life, but you can struggle less when they come your way by strengthening your emotional fitness and creating a more supportive relationship with yourself, your thoughts and emotions, and other people.
- Emotional fitness is a SKILL you can improve with practice. Just as you can develop your physical fitness, you can develop your emotional fitness. But instead of your body, you’re training your brain — to help you navigate the rollercoaster of life instead of causing you to struggle with all kinds of unhelpful thoughts.
- Small changes = big impact. Small inner shifts in your mindset and in how you respond to your brain’s thoughts and emotions, can make a huge difference. (Aka, no dramatic life changes required!) Even when you’re going through a difficult time or facing a tough challenge, you can struggle less.
5 Core Emotional Fitness Skills
When you practice these skills consistently, you struggle less, experience greater well-being and resilience, and have more energy to bring to the work and people you care about.
- ACCEPTANCE: The skill of acknowledging the situation and your feelings with clarity instead of getting caught up in the story your brain has created and using that as your starting point to decide the best way forward.
- GRATITUDE: The skill of actively appreciating the small, positive moments in everyday life—even when times are challenging — and sharing your appreciation for other people with them.
- SELF-CARE: The skill of fueling your emotional, mental, and physical energy.
- INTENTIONAL KINDNESS: The skill of being intentionally kind towards others without expecting anything in return.
- THE BIGGER WHY: The skill of regularly connecting with your sense of meaning and purpose by identifying how your daily activities and tasks support your bigger goals, help others, or contribute to something greater than yourself.
Practice your Emotional Fitness Skills!
When you want to improve and maintain your physical fitness, you practice regularly by eating healthy, getting some exercise — you know the drill. It's the same with your emotional fitness, you gotta practice! We've created so many awesome ways to incorporate practice in your daily life. (We promise it doesn’t take long and you won't have to wait ages for it to work — you'll begin to feel the benefits immediately!)
So, let's practice! Here are just a few ways to get started:
AWESOME HUMAN PODCAST
Join us (live via Zoom!) every Wednesday to get an energy boost and strengthen your emotional fitness skills
HAPPIER BOOK
An honest, inspiring, and practical guide to help you struggle less and find more joy even when life is not perfect
@WORK
Learn how to bring the Happier Method to your organization through our workshops, and webinars for companies, teams, and leaders
EMOTIONAL FITNESS 101
Nataly's short videos to help you treat yourself with more compassion, reduce stress, and avoid burning out
The Happier Method meets you where you’re at:
Begin wherever you are right now. Whether you're feeling on the edge of burnout, want to better manage stress, or have more energy to bring to your work and people you care about, the Happier Method can help. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world have used the Happier Method to get more out of life – you can too.
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