Positive Psychology Column for 4-27-03 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. How to Choose Happiness When have you been happiest lately?  Wouldn’t it be great if you knew how to create those happy times whenever you wanted to?  It’s possible to do just that. In fact, the new science of happiness has found that extremely happy people make the conscious choice every day to do something to bring happiness into their lives. Feeling that you are capable of making choices that bring you joy is the foundation of self-esteem.  Choice is being proactive in an effort to make your dreams come true.  Choice is the power to chart the course of your own life. Making choices is based on your ability to see possibilities.  Possibilities always exist, even when you feel like you are backed into a corner.  The false perception that you do not have any choice leads to a sensation of helplessness that is deadly to your mind and spirit, leading to depression, anxiety, anger, obsessiveness, hopelessness and a feeling of being a victim. You lose sight of possibilities when you become blinded by fear.  Fear narrows your choices to fighting, fleeing, or freezing.  You become reactive and your problem-solving ability shrivels.  Then your problems become prisons. But possibilities are always present and are indispensable.  They are as necessary for your mind as oxygen is for your body.  Recognizing possibilities wipes out your deadly emotions by giving you the chance to choose. This process of creating possibilities keeps fear from clouding your mind and points you toward solutions. You can lead yourself from darkness into light by asking yourself questions that help you to discover the resources that are available. There are four basic types of questions that will help you to see new possibilities when you are feeling stuck: 1.  To discover your own best qualities that have helped you the most in the past, ask yourself:  What have I done previously to solve a similar situation?  What strengths have I used in the past to be successful? 2.  To be able to envision positive outcomes, ask: What do I value the most in my life? Where do I want to end up? Who can help me to get there? 3.  To chart a course of action, ask:  How much time will it take for me to turn this around? What’s the best thing that I could do to improve this situation?  4.  To get yourself to start taking action, ask:  What would be an easy first step for me to take?  What would be the final step in reaching my goal?  What are the steps in between? Seeing possibilities and making choices is the very foundation for achieving happiness.  Life can be brutal.  But if you always give yourself options, you will always have hope. You are never the same after life and luck are done with you.  You change - for better or for worse - depending upon your choices.  Your choices create your identity. I have come to believe that your personal choices are the only path to happiness.  When I was younger, I believed that happiness would come from others.  I mistakenly thought that I’d be happy when others saw that I’d achieved the American dream and acquired enough money, status and power.  But that is a never-ending pursuit because there will always be somebody who has more than you do.  So when that pathway didn’t make me happy, it slowly dawned on me that happiness comes from within yourself.  To be happy, I discovered, you have to connect to your inner core qualities.  You have to have the self-awareness of who you are and what you value in life. With that awareness you can pour your heart into making choices that fit you best.  As I’ve learned to make my own choices, I came to realize something that now seems so obvious: Making choices feels good.  There’s nothing quite as nice as the feeling of calling the shots to create your own life. It’s vastly superior to the struggle of trying to make other people like you by doing what they choose, or by doing what they expect.  So I wasn’t surprised to read in the happiness research that making choices feels better than most anything a person can do. You can determine your destiny every day by what you choose to do - and what you decide not to do.  Start paying more attention to the possibilities.  To achieve happiness, your choices must reflect the voice of your heart directing you toward happiness.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.