1. Long term practice of meditation will develop resilience and a strong sense of selfhood. This helps most people to reframe stressful situations more productively.These practices over time help you to feel in charge of your life and have the impact of creating a more purposeful and fullfilling daily life.

2. Practice of loving presence will impact your outlook in daily activities and allow you to enjoy life experiences. When kindness is easily accessible, people tend to savior their relationships and have more creative power and behave with higher integrity for self and others.

3. Develop your attention to the present moment will connect you to the bliss and joy of being alive and sense of wellness. Research has shown that wondering mind causes unhappiness. Practicing mindfulness will help you understand your wondering mind and can then help you identify and offer accurate insights and solutions for your unique situation.

4. Practice Generosity to yourself and others have shown to promote happiness.

5. Body Movement: dance, walk, shake, run, climb, skip, yoga, gym, swim, cycle; these are some movements you can incorporate into your routine. Make movement a priority in your daily routine to keep energy flowing in your body and mind.

6. Practice of Mind-Body Fusion: Listen to a song or a piece of music, enjoy a piece of art, a play, read or write a poem or cook a dish to savor.

7. Vision, Imaging, Goal setting, Dream – “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”

Some Reading from Science that supports these practices to be pro happiness as follows.

“Well-being is fundamentally no different than learning to play the cello.” This is the conclusion that neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have come to.

Basically: You can get better at well-being. It’s a skill you can train for. At the recent Well-Being at Work conference, Davidson hosted a brief session—“Richie unplugged”—where he talked about four components of well-being that are supported by neuroscience. Mounting research suggests mental training in these four areas can make a difference in well-being. Additionally, the neural circuits involved in these areas exhibit plasticity—they can change in enduring ways for the better.

Extract from a study by Matt Killingsworth, Ph.D.,  a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar. He studies the nature and causes of human happiness, and is the creator of www.trackyourhappiness.org which uses smartphones to study happiness in real-time during everyday life.

“My results suggest that happiness is indeed highly sensitive to the contents of our moment-to-moment experience. And one of the most powerful predictors of happiness is something we often do without even realizing it: mind-wandering.

Be here now

As human beings, we possess a unique and powerful cognitive ability to focus our attention on something other than what is happening in the here and now. A person could be sitting in her office working on his computer, and yet she could be thinking about something else entirely: the vacation she had last month, which sandwich she’s going to buy for lunch, or worrying that she’s putting on weight.

This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. And yet it’s not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness.

You’ve probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. “Be here now,” as Ram Dass advised back in 1971. Maybe, to be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. Maybe this is good advice; maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing.

As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there’s no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. Mind-wandering precedes unhappiness but unhappiness does not precede mind-wandering. In other words, mind-wandering seems likely to be a cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.

How could this be happening? I think a big part of the reason is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things: our worries, our anxieties, our regrets. These negative thoughts turn out to have a gigantic relationship to (un)happiness. Yet even when people are thinking about something they describe as neutral, they’re still considerably less happy than when they’re not mind-wandering. In fact, even when they’re thinking about something they describe as pleasant, they’re still slightly less happy than when they aren’t mind-wandering at all.

The lesson here isn’t that we should stop mind-wandering entirely—after all, our capacity to revisit the past and imagine the future is immensely useful, and some degree of mind-wandering is probably unavoidable. But these results do suggest that mind-wandering less often could substantially improve the quality of our lives. If we learn to fully engage in the present, we may be able to cope more effectively with the bad moments and draw even more enjoyment from the good ones.”

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners.

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Well Being is a skill. To help you get started with your individualized program. Please call Client services 604.733.4400 to book your appointment with Chew-Nyet Lee.