Happy people do what happy people do. If you want to get happier—and who doesn’t—do what happy people do.

Happy people exercise. 

Happy people get out in the sunshine. 

Happy people participate in the activity of gratitude until it becomes a habit. 

Happy people hang out with friends. 

Happy people forgive. 

But…

• I just can’t get motivated to exercise.
• I can’t get motivated to stay on the diet. 
• I can’t get motivated to quit that habit. 

Forget motivation. Just do it. An unmotivated walk will burn just as many calories as an unmotivated walk. More importantly, you are more likely to find the motivation the middle of the doing. 

Happy people know it is easier to act your way into feeling that it is to feel your way into acting. 

Happy people know it is easier to act your way into feeling than to wait for the motivation to do what happy people do. 

If you do what happy people do, you will come to feel, in time, what happy people feel. If you do what happy people do you will come to feel, in time, happy. 

The opposite is also true. Unhappy people like dark spaces. They tend to avoid people. They don’t engage in meaningful, productive work. They don’t move much. They do what unhappy people do. That is how the stay unhappy. 

Lyubomirsky started by studying some of the habits and practices that were commonly believed to be mood boosters: random acts of kindness and expressions of gratitude. Each week for six weeks, she had students perform five acts of kindness — donating blood, for example, or helping another student with a paper — and found that they were happier by the end of that period than the students in her control group. She asked a separate group of students to contemplate, once a week, the things they were grateful for, like “my mom” or “AOL Instant Messenger.” They, too, were happier after doing so than a control group. The changes in well-being weren’t particularly large in either study, but Lyubomirsky found it remarkable that so small and low-cost an intervention could improve the quality of students’ lives. In 2005, she published a paper based on those studies arguing that people did have considerable control over how happy they were.[1]