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What I have learned from this assignment is that people stress too much about what is going to happen in the future. People need to live in the moment with friends and family. That is going to make a person happy. Enjoy the moment your in and stress later.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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People need to enjoy the moment. Stress about the future later. If you enjoy the moment with others it will make it more memorable and enjoyable.

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Happiness and unhappiness are connected. People who are unhappy are usually lonely and choose to be happy only about their goals. They also feel like people should only follow their rules. For long term happiness, you need companionship. You naturally feel better when you are with someone. Don't make people feel like they have to follow their rules, the you will just push them away.

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Long-term happiness has a wide range, but there are 5 major ones that lead to long-term happiness. Companionship leads to long-term happiness. When you are around others, you are naturally happier. Feeling isolated lets feelings of insecurity and self-doubt blossom. Another one is having control. Having control of most things in your life makes it to where your like it. Say you want the sofa in a certain spot, and you like it, you'll he happier for the rest of the day. Trying new things helps because it releases dopamine, which is the drug in the brain that makes you happy, and it makes you seem like you live longer. Exercise also helps because physical activity releases endorphins and serotonin in your brain — chemicals that make you feel good and love life. Last, but not least, sleep because people are never happy when they don't get any sleep.

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Flickr/Mateus Lunardi Dutra
In theory, happiness is what we're about, right? Every decision we make, at some level, boils down to trying to be happy.

But when researchers actually study happiness, they find some surprising quirks.

For example, you might suppose that great news like winning the lottery, dropping 20 pounds, or getting a new job would make you happy.

And it does - briefly. But it's only a spike.

(If that sentence makes you less happy, then consider this: The opposite also is true. Bad external events make you unhappy - but that, too, is just a dip. Then you return to your usual self.)

If you need more convincing: A University of Massachusetts study found that people who'd been suddenly paralyzed in an accident were more hopeful in their outlooks than people who'd just won the lottery.

So what does bring happiness - from a brain-science perspective?

Lots of factors are beyond your control. Happy people are often optimistic, spiritual, extroverted, and compassionate, have a great sense of humor, and come from happy parents. Lots of their happiness, in other words, was just handed to them by their genes or upbringing.

But there are some happiness factors that you control - factors that produce long-term happiness. Here's what the research has concluded on this front:

Companionship. Overall, people who spend more time with friends and loved ones are happier than people who are solitary. Feeling isolated lets feelings of insecurity and self-doubt blossom.

Control. Here's one definition of depression: A sense that you have no control over your circumstances. In studies of nursing-home patients and prison inmates, having control over simple things such as furniture placement and selecting TV channels produced measurable improvements in morale and alertness.

When things are awful, it helps to find things you can control, even if they're little things. Join a book club - your idea, your initiative. Purge your closet. Binge-watch a TV show all day Sunday. Do small things that you chose to do.

New things. Trying new things has two effects. First, it releases dopamine (the "happy drug" in your brain).

Second, it makes your life seem longer! You know how coming home from a new place always seems to be faster than going there?

Same idea. Time slows down during new experiences and accelerates during repetitions.

Exercise. The science of this one is well established.

Physical activity releases endorphins and serotonin in your brain - chemicals that make you feel good and love life.

Sleep. Predictable, really. When you're exhausted, it's very hard to feel upbeat.

Do-gooding. Volunteering, giving a gift, sending a note of praise to someone - all of these selfless gestures give you a connection to other people and make you feel good about yourself.

Finally, one more thing about built-in qualities like optimism, humor, and extroversion: Some studies indicate that people who fake these qualities often experience the same increased happiness as people who naturally exhibit them.

(This example is from Psychology Today: "You're in a testy mood, but when the phone rings, you feign cheer while talking to a friend. Strangely, after hanging up, you no longer feel so grumpy.")

So when all else fails, pretend to be happy; after a while, it can become real.
Excerpted from "POGUE'S BASICS: LIFE: Essential Tips and Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You)" © 2015 by David Pogue. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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5 science-backed habits that lead to long-term happiness, regardless of your genes and upbringing

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In theory, happiness is what we're about, right? Every decision we make, at some level, boils down to trying to be happy. But when researchers actually study happiness, they find some surprising quirks. For example, you might suppose that great news like winning the lottery, dropping 20 pounds, or getting a new job would make you happy.

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Just the Survey

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Google Forms - create and analyze surveys, for free.

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Create a new survey on your own or with others at the same time. Choose from a variety of survey types and analyze results in Google Forms. Free from Google.

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Survey Responses
94.7% People were happy
82.9% of people say family activities make them happy.
97.4% of people say their family makes them happy.
People say stress makes them unhappy.

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While pursuing your goal has a build up toward your happiness, but that happiness only lasts for a short amount of time and sometimes it starts to go away and then your desperate. Daisy represented Jay's happiness and when it starts to veer away from him, he becomes desperate. You half to focus on more than one thing that makes you happy otherwise you have nothing to fall on.

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You only feel unhappy when you compare yourself to others. Another reason people are unhappy is being lonely. You have to have someone by your side that you can trust to feel happy.

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You May Not Realize It, But These Little Things Are Making You Unhappy

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Everyone wants to be happy. Yet, many don't achieve it. Here are 50 reasons you may be missing out on squeezing every drop of joy out of life.

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What makes people happy many people ask. Other people make people happy and new experiences make people happy. Thinking about positives make people happy. Having about new experiences make people. Knowing that you have support makes you happy.

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Everybody wants to be happy.

That's why the science of happiness has gained more attention in recent years -researchers have started to produce reports on happiness around the globe, and positive psychology, which focuses on what makes individuals and communities thrive, has skyrocketed in popularity.

At this point, we actually know a fair amount about how certain behaviours, attitudes, and choices relate to happiness, though most research on the topic can only find correlations.

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Researchers think that roughly 40 percent of our happiness is under our own control; the rest is determined by genetics and external factors. That means there's a lot we can do to control our own happiness.

Here are nine happiness-promoting behaviours backed by science.

1. Relationships are essential. A major study followed hundreds of men for more than 70 years, and found the happiest (and healthiest) were those who cultivated strong relationships with people they trusted to support them.
Source: The Harvard Study of Adult Development
2. Time beats money. A number of studies have shown that happier people prefer to have more time in their lives than more money. Even trying to approach life from that mindset seems to make people more content.
Source: Business Insider
3. But it helps to have enough money to pay the bills. People's well-being rises along with income levels up to an annual salary of about $75,000, studies have found. (That number probably varies depending on your cost of living, however.)
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
4. It's worth stopping to smell the roses. People who slow down to reflect on good things in their lives report being more satisfied.
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 5. Acts of kindness boost the mood. Give your friends a ride to the airport or spend an afternoon volunteering. Some research has shown that people who perform such acts report being happier. Source: Review of General Psychology
6. Breaking a sweat is about more than burning calories. Studies show that increased levels of physical activity are connected to higher levels of happiness. Exercise tends to help mitigate the symptoms of some mental illnesses as well.
Sources: American Psychological Association, BMC Public Health
7. Fun is more valuable than material items. People tend to be happier if they spend their money on experiences instead of things. Researchers have also found that buying things that allow you to have experiences - like rock climbing shoes or a new book to read - can also increase happiness.

Sources: Social Psychology Bulletin
Read more: * Online mattress startup SIMBA is 'continuously' raising money and got another £2 million in May Read the original article on Business Insider UK. © 2016. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.
* A solution to job-stealing robots is staring us right in the face
* A neuroscientist says the female brain is the boardroom's largest untapped resource

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Science says happier people have these 9 things in common

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Everybody wants to be happy. That's why the science of happiness has gained more attention in recent years -researchers have started to produce reports on happiness around the globe, and positive psychology, which focuses on what makes individuals and communities thrive, has skyrocketed in popularity.

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As photos from my adolescent years will attest, I've never been one for smiling on cue. I've gotten better at expressing the smile within, but in too many photos, I look like I'm having only the smallest amount of fun. Nevertheless, research keeps showing the interesting effects surrounding a simple smile.

Before we jump into the surprising science of smiles, I want to clarify one thing off the bat. Some of these studies compare authentic smiles to forced smiles. How can you tell a real smile from a fake smile? Psychologists have found that a particular set of facial actions give away true smiles. These "genuine" smiles are called Duchenne smiles. These are smiles that engage the muscle around your eyes. (Test your smile-detecting abilities here.)

Smiling is linked to a bunch of benefits for a few reasons. One is that a smile is a reflection of happiness. We already know from tons of studies that happier people experience a ton of positive outcomes. Therefore smiling is linked with life benefits because it shares a room with happiness. The other is that people are treated differently when they smile. One study showed that the more a person smiled in a photo, the more viewers of that photo expected an interaction with that person to go well...and expectations like that make people treat others with more warmth.

Smiling and Social Health

So, smiling is great...but how, exactly? Well, as we just saw, smiling signals friendliness and encourages positive interactions. People are drawn more to people who seem happy, even after controlling for perceived physical attractiveness.

As a result, people with a propensity to display genuine happiness are likely to enjoy quality social relationships. This pattern has shown up several times in some remarkable studies.

One study collected a bunch of yearbook photos from a small women's college in 1958 and 1960. Fastidious researchers analyzed those photos for signs of genuine smiles. The people in those photos were contacted when they were about 27 years old-about 5 years after the photos were taken. The researchers found that the more these women were smiling in their yearbook photos, the more likely they were to be married 5 years later.

They also contacted these women much later-when they were about 52 years old. This was many years after their photos were taken! Yet, the more they were smiling in their yearbook photos, the more they report being satisfied in their marriage at age 52!

Another study contacted university alumni (men and women) and got responses from nearly 500 former students. Like in the other study, they analyzed the respondents' yearbook photos for signs of genuine smiling. This study, though, was interested in divorce. They found a reliable connection between smile intensity in yearbook photos and the likelihood of divorce later in life. People who smiled more in their yearbook photo were less likely to get divorced later in life.

Smiling and Physical Health

It's no secret that happier people tend to be healthier. But can this be captured by a smile?

First, how about we look at a pretty obvious sign of health: not dying. Researchers gathered photos from more than 200 Major League Baseball players who were active in 1952. They sorted them based on whether the player showed a genuine Duchenne smile or wasn't smiling at all. And because people keep tabs on professional athletes, the researchers also had access to the dates when those baseball players died.

Overall, players with genuine smiles in their photos tended to live longer than non-smilers. When you look year by year, the smiling players were about half as likely as non-smilers to die in any given year.

A recent study shines new light on the life expectancy results. Student ID photos were analyzed for signs of smiling, and those students were asked whether they had visited a health center in the past year. Students who smiled for their ID photos were more likely to have visited a health center in the past year. This turned out to be especially true for preventive health center visits.

Smiling and Mental Adjustment

Smiling has also been associated with personal psychological benefits, too. In particular, smiling seems to help people deal with negative emotional events.

One study considered a group of people who recently lost someone they loved. All of these participants briefly spoke about their relationship with the person who had recently passed away. Researchers observed video of these interviews and analyzed them for signs of genuine smiling and/or laughing. They followed up with the participants later and found that the more they smiled or laughed as they talked about their deceased partner, the better they were managing their grief 25 months after the person passed away.

Another study showed that students who smiled more during a speech were better able to cope with negative emotions and showed less distress over a 2-year period.

Smiling and Well-Being

This one might seem like a no-brainer. After all, happier people smile more.

Nevertheless, signs of smiling predict life satisfaction later in life. In the study from before that looked at yearbook photos and marriage outcomes, the surveys also contained a measure of well-being. At the time the yearbook photos were taken-when the women were about 21 years old-the more they were smiling in their photo, the more they said they felt a sense of well-being.

That's not too surprising, but the more people smiled in their college yearbook photo, the greater well-being they felt at age 27, 43, and 52 (when the researchers followed up)! In other words, something about one's whole life can be captured in a single photo.

More recently, researchers collected Facebook profile pictures from first-semester college students. These photos tend to be more informal than posed yearbook pictures. So they analyzed these Facebook photos for signs of genuine smiling and got in touch with these students again when they were about to graduate.

Like the yearbook study, people who smiled more in their Facebook profiles 3.5 years earlier reported greater life satisfaction, compared to the non-smilers. Their results also suggest that this is at least partially because the smilers were more satisfied with their social relationships.

Smiling and (Reduced) Aggression

To quickly consider a different sort of smiling effect, some research has linked smiling to less physical dominance. A smile doesn't just communicate friendliness-it also shows that you aren't hostile and aggressive. In a study of UFC fighters, researchers connected pre-fight photos with competitors' success in the ring. (Is there a "ring" in UFC? I'm only mildly familiar with mixed martial arts, and my assumption was always that a mud pit was involved. I digress...)

In general, winning fighters didn't smile as much as losing fighters in their pre-fight photos. When a random sample of people viewed these photos themselves, they tended to view smiling fighters as more physically dominant than non-smiling fighters...even though they had no idea that the study had anything to do with smiling.

Smile and the World Smiles With You

So, there you go. The state of Smile Science.

I find these studies super interesting-especially the ones that link a single photo to the person's life 30 years later. In many ways, though, these studies aren't as satisfying as I wish they were. The lingering question is why? What is it about a fleeting genuine smile that can predict one's health and well-being? More research is certainly needed to clear that up.

And before you interpret this evidence as a reason to smile more, I want to encourage some caution interpreting these findings. Because this is all correlational, it's hard to say definitively that smiling makes people healthier, have better relationships, etc. It's perfectly plausible that smilers are a particular breed. That is, maybe the smiling itself isn't important, but smiling is just a sign of something deeper. The kind of person who smiles in their yearbook photo may just be the kind of person who is equipped to handle adversity and to seek out meaningful relationships.

These effects are also pretty subtle. It's not that smilers are hugely more likely to be married and satisfied with their lives; they're just somewhat (but reliably) more likely.

What I'm saying is that these studies are super interesting as a social scientist. They reveal something about the nature of emotion and human experience. They just don't necessarily mean that smiling is a magic pill to make amazing things happen. But we'll keep an eye out for more research!

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The Power of a Smile: Social Psychology and Health

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As photos from my adolescent years will attest, I've never been one for smiling on cue. I've gotten better at expressing the smile within, but in too many photos, I look like I'm having only the smallest amount of fun. Nevertheless, research keeps showing the interesting effects surrounding a simple smile.

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Why do people smile?- Medical News today

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Why do people smile?- Medical News today

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Some may say that when you smile is when you are really happy. People really smile when they are engaged in something, like social media or a test.

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People smile for different reasons, in various contexts, but only certain kinds of smile generally pass as an honest mark of happiness. Is this what they really are, though?

Do we smile to convey happiness, or is there a different reason?
Although smiles are generally taken as signs of contentment, humans actually smile for many different reasons.

Sometimes we do smile simply because we are happy, but we also smile for social reasons and to put people at ease, as well as to show more complex emotions, such as resignation.

One smile type that people tend to perceive as a genuine mark of happiness is the Duchenne smile, wherein different sets of facial muscles are activated at the same time.

In the Duchenne smile, the person smiles with their mouth as well as their eyes. In popular culture, this action is sometimes referred to as "smizing."

Are these kinds of smile always what they appear to be? What really does make us smile? These are questions that researchers from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the United Kingdom have recently strived to answer.

Dr. Harry Witchel and colleagues have conducted a study aiming to learn when participants tended to smile in an experimental context, and why that might be.

They presented the new findings at the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, held in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

"According to some researchers, a genuine smile reflects the inner state of cheerfulness or amusement," says Dr. Witchel.

"However, Behavioral Ecology Theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions; that theory claims that cheerfulness is neither necessary nor sufficient for smiling."

'Smiling is not driven by happiness'

The researchers worked with a cohort of 44 healthy participants, 26 of whom were women, aged 18-35.

As part of the experiment, the participants had to answer a fairly difficult quiz - presented on a computer - that lasted only 175 seconds. The level of difficulty, as well as the short duration, ensured that the volunteers often provided the wrong answers.

Each participant was seated and left alone with the computer. Their facial expressions were recorded using special facial recognition software.

Then, the researchers assessed the correspondence between the participants' various moods and the times at which they smiled using a two-way approach.
"Our study showed," Dr. Witchel says, "that in these Human-Computer Interaction experiments, smiling is not driven by happiness; it is associated with subjective engagement, which acts like a social fuel for smiling, even when socializing with a computer on your own."
On the one hand, each participant rated their own experience of the quiz on a scale of 12 possible moods, such as "bored," "interested," or "frustrated." On the other hand, the researchers used the facial recognition software to see how often the participants smiled.

The researchers found that, all in all, the participants were not likely to smile when they were trying to answer the questions on the quiz. Instead, they were likely to smile after they had answered the questions, as the computer would confirm whether they had been right or wrong.

Most notably, however, the participants seemed to smile most often when they found out that they had delivered the wrong answer.

After analyzing the data, the researchers concluded that the mood that seemed to be associated with smiling most often was, simply, "engagement." This suggests that smiles might sometimes appear as an unconscious social reaction.

"During these computerized quizzes," explains Dr. Witchel, "smiling was radically enhanced just after answering questions incorrectly."

"This behavior could be explained by self-ratings of engagement, rather than by ratings of happiness or frustration," he adds.

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People smile for different reasons, in various contexts, but only certain kinds of smile generally pass as an honest mark of happiness. Is this what they really are, though? Do we smile to convey happiness, or is there a different reason? Although smiles are generally taken as signs of contentment, humans actually smile for many different reasons.