“When your energy expands, you experience greater happiness; when your energy contracts, you experience less happiness.”  Marci Shimoff

How much attention do you pay to how you feel?

The godly can look forward to happiness, while the wicked can expect only wrath.  (Proverbs 11:23; NLT)

Sharon blessed me with a GPS for Christmas.  Now I consider myself a fairly technical savvy guy, but I’ll have to admit that the GPS blows my mind.  I just can’t imagine the programming and technology behind that little beauty.  Anyway, what does a GPS have to do with happiness?  Well, if you’re ever lost and someone hands you a GPS, I believe you will instantly see the connection.  Seriously though, that is not what this is about.

As a follow-up to Monday’s DG on Marci Shimoff’s newest book, Happy for No Reason, she talks of the group of “100 truly happy people” which she interviewed for her book.  Through the interviews she observed three guiding principles  that played a significant role in all of them to help them “become, or remain, Happy for No Reason.”  The first principle is “what expands you makes you happier.”

She writes, “Science has shown that everything in the universe, including you, is composed of energy.  Everything you say, think, or do, everything you’re around, either expands your energy or contracts it.  When your energy expands you experience greater happiness; when your energy contracts, you experience less happiness.”

Since we were designed to have control over our thoughts (see 2 Cor. 10:5) we can choose to think the thoughts, which create the feelings, which create the behaviors that expands our energy rather than contracts it.  “Raising your happiness set-point is a matter of developing those habits that expand your energy….Expansion is your highway to happiness.  You can use this guiding principle to see if you are moving toward happiness by being aware of how contracted or expanded you feel throughout the day.”

Voila!  There’s your happiness GPS!  If you’re feeling happy, love, optimism, acceptance, well-being, et al., then the little GPS voice tells you to continue on in the same direction.  If, on the other hand, you’re feeling unhappy, fear, pessimism, resistance, low energy, et al., then the little GPS voice is telling you to turn around!  You’re going in the wrong direction!

The question of the day is, “Are you listening to that ’still, small’ voice?”

Prayer Power
Lord, we so often don’t listen to that still, small voice that you designed to be our guidance system.  Please turn up the volume so we can clearly hear it over the hectic lifestyles most of us tend to live.

Link of the Day
Happy for No Reason

Blessings on you as you begin to use your happiness GPS.