Five Minutes to Happiness

Book excerpt: The greatest adventure in our lives is to learn the art of being happy. Happiness, like worry, is a habit, just as tying a shoelace or brushing our teeth becomes a habit. And, as you'll learn in this book, it only takes five minute a day to install happiness as a lifelong habit. Once the happiness habit is developed then it becomes a permanent part of your personality--requiring little or no effort on your part. You'll learn that tensions are at a minimum when we are happy. We cannot eliminate tensions altogether, yet wherever possible we must stand up to these tensions and stresses to develop our mental and spiritual muscles, just as in a game an athlete shows his abilities best under stress. In this book, you'll learn that we have a "built-in" success mechanism, also a "built-in" failure mechanism, and it is up to us to utilize the success mechanism in order to maximize happiness. And you'll learn that to be happy we must learn that we have another image besides the external one we see in the mirror. We have an inner self image that is the result of what we are and what we think we are...and this image we ourselves create depending on what aspects of the success or failure mechanisms we use. This in turn gives clothing to our personality. Getting the happiness habit means that we can use our imagination properly. Getting the happiness habit means that we become our own plastic surgeon and without the use of a magic scalpel perform magic on our self image, constructing a self image we can live with by removing the scar on it through understanding-an inner scar we put there with our own mental and spiritual bands, because we didn't understand. In Five Minutes to Happiness, you'll spend five minutes each day to reinforce these key ideas, and to pave the way to a joyous life adventure.