Since the beginning of time, people have been struggling to define and understand happiness. In recent years, researchers have become more interested in the science behind it. Research has found that happiness isn’t dependent on the things you own or how much money you have. Your unhappiness is caused by any number of other factors, like your status in life or your relationships. If you’re feeling unhappy, but you have no other symptoms of and haven’t been diagnosed with depression, then you may just need help increasing your happiness.
How Can Counseling Help Increase Happiness?
Since everyone’s cause of unhappiness will differ, your counselor may try different exercises to help you learn how to create a happy life for yourself. Some of the most common areas they may focus on include:
- Having a sense of control. People who have a strong sense of control in their lives tend to have higher levels of happiness. Your counselor may work with you to identify areas where you lack control and work on helping you gain control, or to focus on the areas in which you already control.
- Maintaining healthy relationships. Humans aren’t wired to be alone. This means that you need to develop and maintain meaningful relationships, to help keep your mental and emotional well-being in check. Being mentally and emotionally healthy will help to keep your thoughts, and emotions, positive. But this also means that you need to recognize when relationships are having a negative effect on you. Counselors can help you determine what is and isn’t healthy for you, so you can work on keeping healthy relationships.
- Being grateful. In the same article, one counselor mentions that they have clients fill a journal with the things they are grateful for, whether it’s a person, a small act of kindness, their job, etc. The counselor claims this changes their mindset and perspective significantly. Seeing how much you have to be grateful for can help you to find happiness.
- Enjoying the small things. It makes sense that experiencing happiness frequently, even if it’s a small pleasure, would keep us feeling fulfilled longer than infrequent large pleasures. Counselors may help you to recognize the small, but positive, things in your life, and keep track of them.
- Thinking of problems as opportunities. Changing your mindset to think of problems as an opportunity to grow seems like a difficult task. But your counselor may help you with exercises meant to show you how you can use every failure or issue in life to grow and increase your chances of happiness the next time a similar situation arises.
These are just some of the areas a Thriveworks McDonough happiness counselor may help you to work on, but there are many more. A different approach of counseling, to increase happiness, could be through positive psychology. Positive psychology focuses on only the positive things, such as building your strengths instead of overcoming weaknesses, building good things in life instead of repairing the bad, and creating a great life, rather than a normal one. If your counselor practices positive psychology, you’ll be working to find the good in your life and building it up until there’s no room for the bad.
The true path to happiness is focusing on yourself, and the good in your life. Seeking the help of a counselor at Thriveworks McDonough can help you find the good. Schedule today by calling 678-853-5849.
