Happy Matters: 5 Reasons to Choose Happy Every Day

I didn't know what it truly felt like to be happy until I was 41 years old. In this post, I'm sharing where the term "Happy Matters" came from, five science-backed reasons choosing happy benefits your body and mind, and exactly how I practice choosing happy in real life: from being on the road to work stress to living with chronic pain and narcolepsy. This isn't about pretending everything is fine. It's about understanding that happy is an And, not an Or, and why that distinction matters so much if you're stuck in the suck.

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Today I'm talking about how to get happier in life without being delusional or denying your reality. While this video is great if you're having a hard day, it's really even better if every day is hard. Thinking about your thinking around happy will help you find better ways to help yourself choose it. This is called metacognition. I call it surviving Tuesday.

So, way back in 2011, I coined the term Happy Matters. And I did it because I've lived a very, very complicated and challenging life. And I didn't even know what it felt like to be truly happy until I was 41 years old. Once I got there and I was able to see things through the rear view mirror, a lot of things became more clear to me and I'm going to share some of those with you today.

So, if you'd like to think about that for a few minutes, welcome in to your Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn, videos designed to expand your thinking.

First of all, I want to say the reason to remember happy matters is for you. It's not for anyone else. It's not to make you more palatable or easier to be around. It's because it literally changes your physiology. You get more go juice. Start to become your own cheerleader. Before you know it, things are just not bothering you the way they used to.

I'm going to give you some tips to help you practice at the end of this video. So, be sure to stick around. I'm going to lovingly challenge you to try this for a month and see the difference that it makes in your life. And if you notice a difference, you can jump into my five week Happy Matters Experience coming up. And there'll be a link in the description to learn more about that.

Once I deeply understood that happiness is a choice, I started to make the decision to choose happy more often to remember that happy matters so that I could choose it.

Five legit science-backed reasons why choosing happy is good for you. It gives you increased resilience. You bounce back faster. When something happens to me, I know that the sooner I can regulate my nervous system, the easier it will be for my body to process what's happening to me. And that brings less stress, less pain, and less frustration.

Another benefit of remembering that happy matters is that you have greater life satisfaction even when you're stuck in the suck. Remembering to choose happy fills you with empowerment and helps you feel like you have good self-control. Encouragement comes from the inside out. And like Dr. Wayne Dyer says, when life squeezes you, what comes out? You want it to be encouragement for yourself.

When happy is a priority for you, it gives you more emotional awareness. One of the first things I have my resilience coaching clients work on is, once they get upset, to focus on getting unupset, because being upset doesn't accomplish anything other than upsetting the balance in your nervous system. So, you get upset and you look at it. You feel your feels and keep your feet out of the fire.

When you're dealing with lifelong challenges or you've had a traumatic past and emotional regulation is challenging for you, you want to be able to regulate your emotions as quickly as possible. I teach my clients to lean on their emotional tools and have a rescue plan for themselves. And that looks like deploying your reminder tools like being a no drama llama. So you can be really unhappy that you're going through something awful and really happy that you're controlling yourself and not letting it control you.

One more benefit and then I'll give you some ways that you can practice this. This is probably one of the most important benefits for people who are chronically ill because it's something that's extra challenging for us and that is improved relationships. When you feel like a rusty bag of nails, it can be kind of hard to hide that sometimes. And people can often confuse being in pain with being unhappy. And when you're teaching yourself to bring on the self soothing and the comfort, it's a lot easier for you to process when you're not feeling well so that it doesn't necessarily look like you're unhappy.

Am I saying to pretend to feel better so that other people like you? No, that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is you can deal with things inside of yourself that don't show up on your face. You don't want to make other people pay a tax to be in your company. I have no problem telling people my faulty meatsuit is not cooperating and you can just pay attention to me instead of it and all will be well. Nothing about dwelling on your pain makes it easier to deal with.

Okay. So, choosing happy and some tips to help you choose happy. The most important thing is that you remember why you're choosing happy. It's not to please anybody or to manifest riches. It's literally just so you feel better.

**Hey, Dawn Super here. If you thrive on repetition, if you love little phrases to help you with your memory, and you're looking for effective tools to help you on your personal growth journey, take a second and check out my Fridge Philosophy magnets at https://happymatters.guru . Whether you're trying to survive starting over by yourself, working on ending generational trauma, trying to find your patience in an impatient world, or teaching your traumatized brain how to actually regulate your nervous system, because there's no reason that doing the work can't be fun. Okay, back to it.**

When you're stuck in traffic. I love driving and I love driving fast and I don't want to be frustrated when I can't go fast as I want to go. And so I started making up songs about the drivers that are holding up the time. They're they're keeping time for everyone behind them. And it helps me vent out the frustration that they won't go one mile over the speed limit and keeps me from getting frustrated on my commute. Reminding myself that a lot of the people driving around me are probably driving around me every day also helps me keep "Oh, yeah, sure. Come on in. I'll let you get ahead of me." Not that I need anyone on the road to like me, but it does make it easier when you're sharing good vibes rather than stabby eyes.

Another opportunity to practice choosing happy is when you're under work stress. In addition to being a resilience coach and helping people face things that are very hard for them to face, I'm also a fractional executive helping companies face things that they don't want to face. One of my clients has a 26-year-old inventory and another has a 30-year-old inventory. And both of those things are very daunting for them. So, one of the things that I do to help them manage their stress is to point out what's going right and then bring on the self soothing. When this project is done, this is going to happen and this is going to happen and you're going to be so relieved. By focusing on the results and the good things that are helping us get there, we can reduce our work stress, even if it's just in our own minds (which is really where it matters).

Doing chores is another great opportunity to practice choosing happy. You don't need to be mad, sad, frustrated, or put upon just cuz you have to do chores. I like to think about the movie Enchanted where she opened the windows in New York City and the rats and cockroach just came in and cleaned her house. I find it so amusing that I sometimes listen to the song Happy Working Song while I'm cleaning my own house. I spent the first 41 years of my life miserable and I can tell you that negative emotions are like wearing a weighted vest. And I have narcolepsy, which is a really hard, difficult thing to live with. And singing songs while you do chores, it helps you a lot more than being garbled upset sound about having to do them.

Having hard talks with yourself. Because a lot of my clients have trauma in their past, we talk a lot about having hard talks with yourself when you're faced with unfairness to be able to slow down and ask yourself, "What is it about this situation that's making you feel this way and how can you empower yourself through it rather than reacting to it?" One of the companies that I work with changed their policy and made the bathroom for the ladies on a different floor. So rather than letting it be a problem or giving it any gravity to take away my good day or create stress for me, I just take my time and I'm good to myself and I don't let it get in my way.

And of course, a life that's interrupted by health issues. I spent the last several months dealing with pain in my back because I had a problem with my bed and I didn't catch it. I've had problems with my sinuses because I got some new teeth and I didn't follow the operating instructions correctly and I caused some problems for myself. And the whole time I was dealing with those challenges, I was still making sure to remember happy matters and to be happy about what there is to be happy about. Because happy is an And, not an Or a But. You can be happy and any other emotion.

Choosing happy when you're facing health issues gives you courage. It helps you celebrate your victories. There is so much more comfort in happy than sad. So whether you find a way to choose happy from my 14-day book or from my upcoming five-week Happy Matters Experience or you do it on your own, just make sure you do it.

I have a five week program coming up that's going to help you learn to let go and then to also build yourself up.

Click the link below to get on the waitlist and receive an early bird discount when registration opens. https://dawnsuper.com/freeyourself

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