Project Happiness Articles — Wellbeing

Connection is my shorthand for the incomparable bliss of knowing and embracing your values and true self, authentically moving through the world nurturing positive connections with other people and the world around you. The idea of connecting (to your own self, to other people, and to any other aspect of our lives) is something with intuitive appeal for us. Life is really all about relationships – how we relate to ourselves, to others, to the world, to our work, etc. What would happen if we focused on strengthening all of those relationships, instead of trying to be “happy”?

Many of us do not learn enough tools when growing up to manage stress. Unless we take the initiative to learn alternative coping strategies, we respond to stress with the same patterns we have learned as children. Ten years ago as a pre-med college student, I was so stressed out that I wanted to drop out of college. I believed that I had to be perfect in order to be successful. I feared failure. I knew I needed to make a radical shift, so I started to see a mind-body therapist and adopt a meditation and yoga practice. These practices provided me with some starting tools to retrain my brain to handle stressors with resilience. 

A typical classroom is not necessarily conducive to talking about personal topics. In fact, it's just the opposite - it's set up for learning, not "venting." Project Happiness Curriculum and Handbook ask students to open up and to become vulnerable so that personal growth can occur.  In order for students to feel comfortable, facilitators must explicitly establish a safe space when working our program.

Stress is a faithful friend. It doesn’t discriminate and it will never leave you. Its regular, intense presence will weigh down on you, instigate early onset aging, damage your immune system and lead to mental fragility. At the very heart of your responsiveness to stress lies the hormone Cortisol, which is simultaneously essential for self-preservation and the bane of your existence. But why is everyone so riled up about a meager hormone?

Martial arts is an ancient sport that survives to this day in many forms. Though many people view it as violent and don’t think it has any suitable benefits, it’s actually about the opposite of violence. It’s about finding peace within yourself and coping with daily life with your feet firmly on the ground. T

Let’s begin with discussing some very important . Some of the most fascinating areas of human activity is the ability to progress above life situations and circumstances. Humans have this stunning and intrinsic ability to manifest things from within there internal functionality to the external world.

Wellness, contrary to belief, is not just about the absence of illness. There’s more to the quality of our life than simply not being sick, and modern-day living can sometimes make it difficult to remember this. We get stuck in that fast-paced chaos of work, errands, and appointments, and we barely notice how much it drains us, bit by bit, until we’re completely exhausted.

Thoughts precede action! But the key word in that phrase is action. If we have our “ideal” life only in our heads and written out as lists that we look at occasionally throughout the year-we most likely will never reach our “ideal” self. 

For someone who has spent a lot of time fighting for a more positive, fulfilled life and committing to never give up on attaining mental freedom, surrendering wouldn’t have come up as a word I ever particularly resonated with. It didn’t ooze the strength and tenacity that I wanted to exude; my mind equated it with weakness and would stubbornly avoid that idea of it.

Everyone wants to be happy. Behind our every action is our desire for happiness. However, unknowingly we have certain mindsets, I call those happiness stealers, which as the term suggests, keep us from being happy.