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How to prevent your stress? Get happy fast! There are 10 easy ways to get happy fast. Check it out!

1. JOIN THE CLUB

Joining a club not only gives you a sense of belonging and well-being –it’s incredibly beneficial for your health. Joining local clubs, societies and groups actually increased lifespan and made participants infinitely less likely to develop cancer and heart attacks.

With our emphasis on individualism, we tend to associate happiness with success; with being driven and striving for personal achievement. Sharing and sociability make us make us much happier, healthier and often wealthier too. Besides, it’s great fun to share activities with like-minded people and it forces us to get one more and not just on concentrate on home or work. So sign up for something today! Don’t just join the gym, that’s too individual. Join a sports club if you want to get healthy or a book group if it’s your mind you want to feed.

2. A SORROW SHARED It really is true that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved, or at least rendered less potent. People who keep their troubles to themselves inevitably suffer far more than those who able to “get rid” of them by telling close friends.

Self disclosure like this is very important. Telling others about your problems, sadness, disappointments and anxieties not only make it easier to cope, it makes you healthier too! Men find divorce a lot harder than women because while a woman will, usually, talk to her friends about what she’s going through, a man has often lost the only person he could talk to. This can have serial consequences for his health. Divorced men are much more likely to die of heart disease or cancer than married ones.

You don’t need lots of friends; just a few close ones you feel comfortable disclosing to and who feel they can disclose to you. So if your friendship network is wide but shallow, make sure you have at least one or two really good friends you feel you can truly trust. Having friends you can rely upon is good for you overall sense of security and thus happiness. Let them disclose to you though; the greatest human happiness comes from giving and there’s little quite so generous as letting someone cry on your shoulder. So provided it’s not too one-sided and you both get your turn at sharing sorrows, self disclosure is another route to happiness.

3. CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

When one of life’s nasty little surprises happens along like, say, losing your job or a relationship breakdown, it’s amazing how much difference it can make if you change your environment, even slightly.

If you make even tiny, hardly perceptible changes to your home environment-or your desk at work or your car- you disrupt the associations your old layout held for you and this can be a good start to moving on and making a new, healthier and happier associations.

4. WRITE THAT DOWN!

Not for nothing do therapist often suggest that clients keep a daily journal of how their feeling. This doesn’t work if you’re severely depressed, in which case you might need medical treatment, but it can be very beneficial if you’re mildly depressed, fed up, feel in a rut, had a major setback in life or just want to try and make sense of everything that’s happening around you. Mostly counselors always encourage their clients to write stuff down. They can show them what they’ve done or just keep it to themselves. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the process of offloading, of expressing yourself, that counts.

Creative people such as musicians, actors and authors will tell you that they aren’t necessarily the happiest people around and in fact, misery or a sense of displacement with the world around them is often what sends people into these industries. But they do benefit from self expression; from getting it “out there” off their chest and somewhere else.

So if you’re feeling low and you don’t know why, writing it down might help. It’s at least worth a go.

5. WORK THAT BODY!

Yes. It’s a favorite in any “Get Happy” recipe but exercise really does make a difference and not just because you feel self righteous and pleased with yourself for doing it. No, exercise physiologically makes you happier because whenever you increase your heart rate to the point where you become a bit breathless, the body releases natural opiates called endorphins which flood you with a sense of well-being and happiness. This is why some people actually become addicted to exercise-they are addicted to the “Happy Hormones” their body rewards them with every time they exercise.

You don’t need to join an expensive gym or buy expensive equipment or take up an energetic sport or nature. Just walking for 15 to 20 minutes a day, at a vigorous pace, is sufficient to raise your endorphin levels and make you feel much better.

6. WATCH HOW MUCH YOU DRINK

Alcohol might feel like it’s giving you an instant lift from the moment you take that much-wanted first sip of the night but in fact, alcohol to make yourself feel better, or happier, will simply not work.

It’s better to “use” happy foods such as salads, protein, fruit- especially bananas- and complex carbohydrates such as wholemeal bread, brown rice and particularly pasta. These will flood the body with serotonin- the hormone that is found in Prozac and other anti-depressants. And that’s a far better way to get an emotional uplift than trying to drown your sorrows in a bottle!

Drink is fine if you’re already happy enough, but because it tends to enhance your mood, rather than change it, steer clear of imbibing too much when you’re at your lowest-it will, quite literally, make you go lower.

7. GET PLENTY OF SLEEP Happy people sleep well. Or at least give sleep the importance and place in their lives that it deserves. It’s not always easy to sleep well of course, especially if we problems or something weighing heavily on our minds. But there are ways to improve your chances. Always go to bed at the same time and at the same time, even on the weekends.

Don’t eat anything heavy before bed; but a light snack and a glass of milk help. Don’t do any vigorous exercise in the evening; but some kind of physical activity during the day should help you sleep better. Don’t read in bed or watch television. Otherwise you subconsciously associate the bed with something other than sleeping.

Keep bed for sleep and stick to a routine that works for you. That way you’ll give yourself one of nature’s best happiness boosts.

8. COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

Not easy when life’s thwacked you with a metaphorical hammer but you are a lot better off than you think. Unless you’re living the life of a homeless refugee in a war-torn country with no food, no water and no form of stable government to ever make things better, then you’ve plenty to feel blessed about.

Once you moved on from that, focus on something that’s really good in your life. Come on, there must be something. Give yourself what psychologists call a “perceptual shift” which doesn’t change the facts of your life but does change how you view them. This is also known as “cognitive restructuring”- try to think about something in a different way. We can, in fact, train the brain to think more positively and our down moments are a good time to put this into practice. Compile a list of your favorite people, your favorite times, your favorite holidays, favorite parties. Honestly, just thinking about this happy snapshot in your life will retrain your brain to be more positive and have a happier outlook.

9. CHANGE THE MOOD MUSIC

Music is both a great mood enhancer and mood alterer so, if you’re a music fan, play what you like to change your dour mood at the end of a trying day. Uplifting danceable music can really pull out of a low; especially if you give way to urge in your feet to dance. Even if you’re just in the kitchen preparing a ready-made supermarket meal, why not stick a fave CD on and have a it of a bop while you wait for the microwave to ping! It really can make all the difference and lift the gloom.

10. BE LUCKY

Lucky people aren’t just plucked randomly by fate; a lot of them work at it. Can you increase your chances of being lucky? Of course you can, just by believing it’s possible. Lucky people look out for the main chance and the small ones too. They listen to their intuition, we all have, and act on it. They take chances because, okay it might not work out but if you don’t take a risk every now and then, how else will you know?

Everybody faces downturns in life. Don’t imagine when it happens to you that the world has got it in for you-it hasn’t. Life is random, far more random than many of us seem prepared to accept or believe. If your life takes a downturn, assume things will get better, not worse, and be glad they didn’t take an even deeper downturn. There is always a silver lining. You just have to look for it.

And be aware that some people enjoy wallowing in misery and really don’t want to be happy. They will probably achieve their goal and be miserable all their lives. You can do the same in reverse, if you want to. Psychological studies have shown that a miserable person winning the lottery remains miserable; albeit a lot richer. But a happy person who faces a tragedy or a true downturn in life tends to remain a happy person despite what’s happened to them.

Really, it is up to you. Do you want to be happy? In which case, you will be. But it’s not compulsory. You do have a choice and if misery suits you and you’re- be honest- getting more mileage out of that, then stay miserable. Just don’t expect to have lots of friends or live a long fulfilled and healthy life. It’s your call.

For more information about Stress Management, read at Healthy Wealthy