Happier Now

Book excerpt: Experience more joy and meaning each day—and have greater resilience when times get tough What if you could be happier, right now, without radically changing your life? As nationally recognized happiness expert Nataly Kogan teaches, happiness is not a nice feeling or a frivolous extra. It’s a critical, non-negotiable ingredient for living a fulfilling, meaningful, and healthy life—and it’s a skill that we can all learn and improve through practice. In Happier Now, Nataly shares an illuminating, inspiring, and science-based guide to help you build your happier skills and live with more joy, starting now. Nataly’s own journey from Russian refugee to successful investor, tech executive, and founder and CEO of Happier taught her an important lesson: no matter how much you accomplish, how much you live the "right" way, or even how much gratitude you practice, life won’t always be smooth. "We experience genuine and lasting happiness when we stop trying to turn the negative into the positive," Nataly writes, "and when we embrace the full range of our human emotions with compassion and strength." Throughout this engaging guide, Nataly describes how she went from being cynical and resistant to the ideas behind self-improvement and spirituality, to studying everything she could on the science of happiness, to completely shifting her mind-set. You’ll learn five core practices for building your happier skills—acceptance, gratitude, intentional kindness, knowing your bigger why, and self-care—along with the scientific research that supports each one. Highlights include: Daily Anchors—Cultivate a custom set of simple daily practices, fine-tuned for your emotional health needs • Bring more joy and meaning into your life as it is—without needing to make difficult or time-consuming changes • How happiness leads to many of the things you want in life, rather than results from them • Learn an effective five-minute happier workout for whenever you need a boost • Strengthen your "emotional immune system" so you can be okay when times are tough—and bounce back to happy sooner • Specific instructions for tools and techniques that work—based on what’s actually happening in your brain • Effective exercises, journaling prompts, and key insights for developing each core happier skill As Nataly says: "It’s time to stop saying ‘I’ll be happy when . . .’ and start saying ‘I’m happier now because . . .’"