Noa Belling - The Happiness Workout: Learn how to optimise confidence, creativity and your brain!

Introduction

The more you invest in happiness, the more happiness will invest in you.

ALAN COHEN

It is common knowledge that regular exercise helps to keep your body strong, flexible and healthy. What might not be known is that the same applies to happiness that can also be strengthened and toned by practising particular kinds of exercises. How is this so? The answer lies in your ability to manufacture happiness from the inside out by influencing the bio-chemistry associated with happiness. What kinds of exercises strengthen and tone it? This is what the book is all about.

Understanding the bio-chemistry of happiness involves understanding that happiness can be experienced in different ways. It can be a sense of peace and deeper meaning. It can be love and harmony. It can be courage and a strong sense of purpose. It can be excitement and passion. Each have their own bio-chemical signature and all dance together in a life well lived.

The bio-chemicals representing these different qualities of happiness include serotonin, testosterone, dopamine and oxytocin. This book hones in on specific physical skills that can stimulate this bio-chemistry, namely grounding, strength, fluidity, agility, flexibility and warmheartedness. These physical skills not only can influence happiness, they can also stimulate associated qualities such as resilience, compassion, confidence and creativity. They can also literally tone your nervous system to promote and sustain happiness with an added bonus of optimising brain functioning too.

This does not undermine your stresses and challenging feelings such as sadness, anger, shame and fear. What it does is support your ability to navigate lifes ups and downs with greater skill. For example, the skills of this book can help you connect with greater peacefulness, acceptance, courage, proactive energy and motivation, resilience and compassion to help you through trying times. You are also able to directly influence the bio-chemistry of stress, such as adrenaline and cortisol, as the main bio-chemical culprits that can cloud your happiness. To keep your stress bio-chemistry at bay targeted physical strategies are offered to help you bounce back into a more confident and creative flow.

The kind of exercise required to strengthen and tone happiness is exercise with a difference. To start with there is a variety of short physical techniques that take just a few seconds or a couple of minutes to apply, and are intended for inserting now and again in your usual day. They are referred to as short practices or quick tips and are interspersed through the different sections of the book. These are invitations to align with and reinforce happiness in small, accessible daily ways. This could be as simple as pausing now and again to shift posture, release tension, refocus attention or deepen breathing in ways that are proven to stimulate feel-good bio-chemistry. Many of these interventions can be used anytime and anywhere, even at work or while on the go and results can be quick. In a matter of minutes, or sometimes seconds, it is possible to feel noticeably stronger, more positive and happier. This formula of small amounts of time invested regularly is backed by neuroscience as an effective way to create lasting change in brain and body.