{"id":851,"date":"2012-09-16T22:11:54","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T04:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/?p=851"},"modified":"2012-10-26T10:53:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-26T16:53:50","slug":"there-are-so-many-reasons-to-be-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/there-are-so-many-reasons-to-be-happy\/","title":{"rendered":"There are so many reasons to be HAPPY!"},"content":{"rendered":"

First I want to say thank you to all of you who made my birthday so special with your well wishes.\u00a0 That meant a lot to me and I am truly grateful to have so many good friends in my life.<\/p>\n

41 years of life gives a person much to reflect on.\u00a0 When I look back and consider all of the life lessons I have learned thus far there are a few that stand out most prominently to me:<\/p>\n

#1.\u00a0 Always have integrity \u2013 at all times and in all places and in all circumstances.<\/p>\n

#2.\u00a0 Focus your life on making God proud of you, not anyone else.\u00a0 Not a parent, not a spouse, not the boy or girl that sits next to you, not anyone else \u2013 just God.<\/p>\n

#3.\u00a0 Be Grateful and Be Happy!\u00a0 Not tomorrow, or next week, or someday\u2026be happy NOW!\u00a0 \u00a0And if you have those days when you aren\u2019t feeling happy then realize that you are forgetting to be grateful because gratitude is the precursor for happiness.\u00a0 Life isn\u2019t going to be perfect and easy, but there is always something to be grateful for.\u00a0 Always.<\/p>\n

“Life is just like an old time rail journey … delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”\u00a0\u00a0 – Jenkin Lloyd Jones<\/span><\/p>\n

Today I want to focus my blog on #3 – Being Happy.\u00a0 There was a great article published called \u201cSmile Every Day\u201d which states:<\/p>\n

Who knows if a smile can change the world, but research shows that it certainly can improve a person’s life.<\/p>\n

A recent study found that a habit of genuine smiling may contribute to happiness and better adjustment in life.<\/p>\n

Researchers in the study looked through 141 photos in a Mills College (Oakland, Calif.) yearbook and separated out genuine smilers from inauthentic ones. The smilers were contacted at age 27, 43 and 52 and asked about the status of their marriage and life satisfaction.<\/p>\n

The women with the genuine smiles were more likely to be married and stay married. They were also more likely to experience greater sense of personal well-being. These results were found to be consistent in a 30-year follow up (“A Genuine Smile Goes a ‘Long Way,'” Vijai P. Sharma, www.mindpub.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n

For many years the conventional wisdom has been that people are happy because they are successful. But additional researchers, who analyzed 225 studies involving 275,000 people, found the truth might be just the opposite \u2014 that people are successful because they are happy.<\/p>\n

Happy people are easier to work with, more highly motivated and more willing to tackle difficult projects. Thus they are more likely to be successful, found a 2005 study published by the American Psychological Association (“Smile For Success,” Dec. 21, 2005, ABC News).<\/p>\n

And a 2008 study shows that people who don’t smile have a negative impact on their friends, and even people they don’t know.<\/p>\n

Each happy friend a person has boosts their chances of happiness by 9 percent. Having grumpy friends decreases it by about 7 percent, found researchers in a paper published last December in a British medical journal (“Smile! Study says being happy can be contagious,” Deseret News, Dec. 5, 2008).<\/p>\n

It might also be interesting to note that the researchers found that money cannot buy happiness. According to the research, extra money increased a person’s odds of being happy only marginally \u2014 notably less than the odds of being happier if you have a happy friend.<\/p>\n

Amazing article!\u00a0 I love it.\u00a0 And more than anything else it reminds us to Be Happy and to surround ourselves with Happy People!\u00a0 Life is a blessing and we can all find reasons to be happy.\u00a0 Start with being grateful, and always remember that even on the hardest days, things can always be worse.\u00a0 So focus on the positive.\u00a0 Focus on the joy and fun and laughter.\u00a0\u00a0 Get up and DANCE once in a while because LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL and SO ARE YOU!\u00a0\u00a0 It is going to be a great week this week\u2026.I can feel it\u2026so SMILE!!!<\/p>\n

~Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First I want to say thank you to all of you who made my birthday so special with your well wishes.\u00a0 That meant a lot to me and I am truly grateful to have so many good friends in my life. 41 years of life gives a person much to reflect on.\u00a0 When I look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,65,55,34,53],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-god","tag-gratitude","tag-happiness","tag-integrity","tag-motivation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1653,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions\/1653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}