This is the one key word to attaining happiness

This is the one key stimmt to attaining happinessThis is the one key word to attaining happinessWe all want to be happy. Thats obvious. But how much would people pay for a moment of happiness?Researchers did a survey - and the answer welches about$80.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moraOther than pure love and dodging discomfort, people were willing to paythe most for happiness.ViaThe Upside of Your Dark Side$ 44.30 for calm tranquility,$ 62.80 for excitement,$ 79.06 for happiness,$ 83.27 to avoid fear,$ 92.80 to avoid sadness,$ 99.81 to avoid embarrassment,$ 106.26 to avoid regret,$ 113.55 for love.(Suddenly heroin is looking prettycheap, and Starbucks is an absolute steal.)At $80 a shot, well, Im about to save you a lot of money.Whats it take to become happy veryquickly without dramatically changing your life (or spending $80)? The key to happiness really comes down to one wordAtt ention.We all have regrets and worries. We all have bad things we could think about. But they dont bother us when we pay them no mind. TheBuddha once saidWe are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.And research is agreeing with him. People always think more money or a better this or that - a thing or event - is going to make them happier.But when we look at the data,very happy peopledont experience more happy eventsthan less happy people.Via50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human BehaviorEd Diener and Martin Seligman screened over 200 undergraduates for levels of happiness, and compared the upper 10% (the extremely happy) with the middle and bottom 10%.Extremely happy students experienced no greater number of objectively positive life events, like doing well on exams or hot dates, than did the other two groups(Diener Seligman, 2002).So its elendlage really what happens. Its what you pay attention to and the perspective you take on things.Look on the bright side is a cliche, but its also scientifically valid.Paul Dolanteaches at the London School of Economics and welches a visiting scholar at Princeton where he worked with Nobel-Prize winner Daniel Kahneman.He explains the importance of attention in his book,Happiness by Design Change What You Do, Not How You ThinkYour happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention.What you attend to drives your behavior and it determines your happiness. Attention is the glue that holds your life together The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to and in what ways. If you are not as happy as you could be, then you must be misallocating your attentionSo changing behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive.Make sense, right? So how can you and I put this to use?Here are 5 questions to ask yourself about attention that can have a profound affect on your happiness.Are youactuallypaying attention?Savoring is a powerful method for boosting happiness. Its also ridiculously simpleNext time something good happens, stop whatever you are doing, give it a second andappreciatethat moment. Pay attention to it.Savoring is all about attention. Focus on the bad, youll feel bad. Focus on the good and guess what happens?ViaHappiness Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological WealthThe key component to effective savoring is focused attention. By taking the time and spending the effort to appreciate the positive, people are able to experience more well-being.Stopping to smell the roses? Its true. People who take time to appreciate beauty around them reallyarehappier.Via100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of LifeThose who said they regularly took notice of something beautiful were 12 percent more likely to say they were satisf ied with their lives.This isnt speculation. Studies show slowing down and appreciating good things boosts happiness and reduces konjunkturtief.ViaThe How of Happiness A New Approach to Getting the Life You WantIn one set of studies, depressed participants were invited totake a few minutes once a day to relish something that they usually hurry through(e.g., eating a meal, taking a shower, finishing the workday, or walking to the subway). When it was over, they were instructed to write down in what ways they had experienced the eventdifferently as well as how that felt compared with the times when they rushed through it. In another study, healthy students and community members were instructed to savor two pleasurable experiences per day, by reflecting on each for two or three minutes and trying to make the pleasure last as long and as intensely as possible. In all these studiesthose participants prompted to practice savoring regularly showed significant increases in happiness and redu ctions in depression.Do one thing at a time. Pay attention. Enjoy it. Youll feel less busy and youll be happier.(For more on how to savor those precious good moments in life, clickhere.)Okay, youre going to pay more attention. But maybe thats not your problem. You might be paying attention to the wrong things.Whatare you paying attention to?Why are lawyers 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression and more likely to end up divorced?Training your mind to look for errors and problems (as happens in careers like accounting and law)makes you miserable.ViaOne Day University Presents Positive Psychology The Science of Happiness (Harvards Most Popular Course)I discovered the tax auditors who are the most successful sometimes are the ones that for eight to 14 hours a day were looking at tax forms, looking for mistakes and errors.This makes them very good at their job, but when they started leading their teams or they went home to their spouse at night, they would be seeing all the lis ts of mistakes and errors that were around them. Two of them told me they came home with a list of the errors and mistakes that their wife was making.Dont pay so much attention to the bad. Pay more attention to the good. Stop looking for problems. Enjoy what you have.Gratitudeis arguably the king of happiness. Whats the research say? Cant be more clearthan thisthe more a person is inclined to gratitude, the less likely he or she is to be depressed, anxious, lonely, envious, or neurotic.You must teach your brain to seek out the good things in life. Research shows merelylisting three things you are thankful for each daycan make a big difference.ViaFlourish A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-beingEvery night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you w rote. The three things need not be earthshaking in importance (My husband picked up my favorite ice cream for dessert on the way home from work today), but they can be important (My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy).Next to each positive event, answer the question Why did this happen?This technique has been provenagainandagainandagain.One of the reasons old people are happier is becausethey remember the good and forget the bad.And feeling gratitude doesnt just make you happier. Its correlated with anobjectively better lifewe found thatgratitude, controlling for materialism, uniquely predicts all outcomes considered higher grade point average, life satisfaction, social integration, and absorption, as well as lower envy and depression.(For more on how to use gratitude to improve your life, clickhere.)Now I know what many of you may be thinkingI agree, but my attention span is terrible.Well, we can do something about that too.Canyou pay attention?You spend up to 8 minutes o f every hour daydreaming. Your mind will probably wander for 13% of the time it takes you to read this post. Some of us spend 30-40% of our time daydreaming.ViaThe Science of Sin The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You)Do you remember what the previous paragraph was about? Its OK, Im not offended.Chances are that your mind will wander for up to eight minutes for every hour that you spend reading this book. About 13 percent of the time that people spend reading is spent not reading, but daydreaming or mind-wandering.But reading, by comparison to other things we do, isnt so badly affected by daydreaming.Some estimates put the average amount of time spent daydreaming at 30 to 40 percent.As Daniel Gilbert, author ofStumbling on Happiness, explained in theHarvard Gazette, a wandering mind is not a happy mindPeople spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what theyre doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unha ppy.So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.This is why you keep hearing so much about mindfulness these days. Meditation can help you train your attention.A 2011 Yale study showedExperienced meditators seem to switch off areas of the brain associated with wandering thoughts, anxiety and some psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. Researchers used fMRI scans to determine how meditators brains differed from subjects who were not meditating. The areas shaded in blue highlight areas of decreased activity in the brains of meditators.(For more on the easiest way to learn how to meditate, clickhere.)Another issue may be that youre not really noticing what truly makes you happy and unhappy. Its a common mistake. But one we can fix.Are you paying attention to what makes you happy and what doesnt?When something makes you really happy, jot it down. Then do that thing more often. Daniel Nettle jokingly refers to this as Pleasant Activity Training.ViaHappiness The Science Behind Your SmileThis staggeringly complex technique consists of determining which activities are pleasant, and doing them more often.Yeah, its stupidly simple. But as Stanford professorJennifer Aakerexplained in my einstellungsgesprch with her, you probablydont do itpeople who spend more time on projects that energize them and with people who energize them tend to be happier. However, what is interesting is that there is often a gap between where people say theywantto spend their time and how theyactuallyspend their time.For example, if you ask people to list the projects that energize (vs. deplete) them, and what people energize (vs. deplete) them, and then monitor how they actually spend their time,you find a large percentage know what projects and people energize them, but do not in fact spend much time on those projects and with those people.(For more of the things research has proven w ill make you happier, clickhere.)Okay, time to bring out the big guns. This is something you can do at any moment to make yourself happier. And all it takes is asking yourself one question.Are you paying attention to whats going onright now?You probably spend a fair amount of time worrying about the future, regretting the past or reliving an argument that ended long ago.And that means youre not paying attention to whats happeningright now. None of those negative things are actually occurringhere in front of you. If you were focused on rightnow, bang, youd be happier.When happiness expertSonja Lyubomirskystudied the happiest people,what did she find?They savor lifes pleasures and try to live in the present moment.That thing youre making yourself miserable about is it here, right now, in front of you? Or are you projecting into the future or the past?Pay attention to the presentand youll probably feel much better.(Formore on what makes the happiest people in the world so happy, clickh ere.)Still paying attention? Lets wrap this up.Sum upMost people dont do anything to make themselves happier.Via100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of LifeResearchers found that the majority of the subjects they studied were not able to identify anything they had done recently to try to increase their happiness or life satisfaction.Be the exception. Its simple. Try shifting your attention to the good around you.Worrying about the future or dwelling on the past or letting your mind wander is a prescription for unhappiness. Those things arent in front of you and theyre not real.AsMark Twainonce saidI have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.Join over 320,000 readers.Get a free weekly update via emailhere.This article first appeared on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedul e that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people