【推荐1】How to Live a Happy Life

Happiness is what we need most with the increase of pressure in modern life.     1     Fortunately, this is not the case. Everyone has the ability to hang on to happiness with his own efforts. The following methods may lead you to long-lasting happiness.

• Take exercise. Other than health benefits that are too numerous to mention, exercise makes you smarter, happier, improves sleep, and makes you feel better about your body.     2     Keeping in touch with nature can help you reduce stress, make you more creative, improve your memory and may even make you a better person.

•     3     Relationships are worth more than you think. Not feeling socially connected can make you stupider and kill you. Loneliness can lead to heart attack, stroke(中风) and diabetes (肥胖症). On the other hand, studies have shown that the longest lived people on the planet all place a strong emphasis on social engagement.

• Challenge Yourself.     4     Music lessons increase intelligence. Challenging your beliefs strengthens your mind. Increasing willpower just takes a little effort each day and it’s more responsible for your success than IQ. Not getting an education or taking advantage of opportunities are two of the things people look back on their lives and regret the most.

• Laugh. Laughter has similar effects to physical exercise. It increases blood pressure, the heart rate and the rate of breathing; it also works several groups of muscles in the face, the stomach, and the feet. It can even reduce the effect of pain on the body. Humor is a good way to cause laughter.     5    

【推荐2】Have you ever agreed to do something only to find out later that you don’t have time? Are you constantly stressed from rushing from one assignment to another? If so, you may have a problem with overcommitment. Overcommitment happens when you decide to do more things than you realistically have time to do.     1     Your quality of life also suffers because overcommitment leaves you less time to take care of yourself. It’s preferable to do one or two things well than to do 10 things poorly - or worse, to back out once you’ve agreed to something.

Time management coach Elizabeth Saunders suggests creating a budget for your time like you do with money. The total amount of time you have each day equals 24 hours minus（减去）the time you need for basic wellness activities.     2    Saunders suggests adding up your time commitments to other people and the time needed to meet your personal goals. If that total is greater than the amount of time you have each day, you have a problem.

    3     Schedule times for everything you need to do – including taking care of yourself. But you don’t have to fill every blank space.

It’s also worth looking at your current commitments. Do your commitments actually match your priorities?     4    

Learning how to say no politely but firmly also helps with overcommitment. It helps to have a good sense of what your priorities are so that you can say yes or no when appropriate.

I have a rule that I never immediately agree to any long-term time commitments.     5    That’s because my first instinct（本能反应）is usually to say yes, even if I don’t really have time. Having time to think about a potential assignment gives me space to say no if I need to.

【推荐3】When we think about happiness, we usually think of something extraordinary, a pinnacle(顶点) of sheer(纯粹的) delight. And those pinnacles seem to get rarer the older we get.    1    I remember playing police and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at such peaks of pleasure as winning a race or getting a new bike is unreserved.For teenagers, or people under 20 the concept of happiness changes.    2    I can still feel the pain of not being invited to a party that almost everyone else was going to. I also remember the great happiness of being invited at another event to dance with a very handsome young man.In adulthood the things that bring great joy—birth, love, marriage—also bring responsibility and the risk of loss.    3    For adults, happiness is complex.    4    But I think a better definition of happiness is “ the ability to enjoy something”. The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It's easy to overlook the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to live where we please, even good health.While happiness may be more complex for us, the solution is the same as ever. Happiness isn't about what happens to us; it’s the ability to find a positive for every negative, and view a difficulty as a challenge.    5