You Can Choose to Be Happy

The book begins by exploring your top goals and values in life. It
teaches how to explore deep causes of unhappiness and how to find many
routes to happiness even in difficult situations. It explores underlying
beliefs that lead to pessimism versus realistic optimism.

People often look for a book about how to overcome low self-esteem,
anxiety, depression, procrastination, shyness, lack of assertiveness, or
other specific problems. This book gives specific help help with these
problems. However, these problems are often symptoms of deeper causes.
What is "broken" isn't usually just habits, but basic beliefs. In
contrast to many problem oriented approaches, a primary goal of this
book is to empower your growth-oriented core.

Inner harmony and growth are keys to happiness. Each of us has a natural
Higher Self that can remain a weak voice within or can become a strong
leader--the executive of our personalities. Providing change in our
top-level is a necessary part of transcending our history and
progressing toward self-actualization. To become strong, the Higher Self
must develop a strong philosophy of life and learn how to bring our
subparts into harmony--like a maestro conducting a great symphony.

Happiness is not just a good feeling; it comes from a mechanism built
into the brain that measures how our lives are doing. One big secret of
this book comes from striking new insights about the causes of emotions.
The Harmonious Functioning model of emotions will teach you how to
adjust your emotions almost like adjusting a thermostat to turn up your
emotional heat or to turn it down.

Being "in the zone" of harmonious functioning creates the Big 3
outcomes--peak learning, peak performance, and peak happiness. It
explains why people who seem to have all life's advantages are often
less happy than people who have much less. Our mental control of
events--not our external control--is the key to happiness. Our happiness
level tells us how healthily our body, mind, and "spirit" are
functioning. It tells us if our lives are in proper balance and harmony.
We can't be maximally happy if we only live for today or only live for
ourselves. An innate brain mechanism controlling our emotions scans our
personal world and will not let us ignore important issues.

Knowing that in any situation we can choose one of many internal or
external routes to happiness gives us optimism and confidence--mental
control of the situation. Learn how to rise above anxiety, anger, and
depression. This simple state-of-the-art model can help you better
understand and control your emotions.

Relationships and loneliness are key sources of happiness or
unhappiness. You can learn how to overcome fears of rejection and
criticism or unhealthy needs for acceptance or codependence. You can
become more internally controlled and assertive. Chapter 6 tells how.