How to Get your Daily DOSE of Happiness

How to Get your Daily DOSE of Happiness
What the Heck is DOSE and why does everybody need it in their life?
DOSE stands for Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins and are neurotransmitters, often called the "feel-good hormones" that are responsible for our feelings of happiness. Our brains are wired for survival, when we do something good, we are rewarded with good feelings. For example, we need to eat to survive, so our bodies trigger dopamine when we eat good food.

When all four of these neurotransmitters are created, we feel good, which leads to motivation, which leads to productivity and so on. Long story short...we need to trigger these on a daily basis to create happiness. When we lack one or more of these, this leads to feeling lethargic, unmotivated, anxious, depressed...you get the idea.

How do we create DOSE Daily?
I always say, in order to bake a cake, you need the ingredients and you need to do the action (mixing and baking). Same with DOSE...we need nutrients in our body to CREATE each element. Once we have the ingredients, we need to take ACTIONS to trigger them.

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How to Exercise for Happiness

How to Exercise for Happiness
Exercise is a power-booster for your mood. When you grab an exercise buddy, you’re getting the full DOSE.
As you exercise, you are creating happy chemicals and the increased circulation moves them around your body, like when you put oil in your car and drive it around a bit to get it moving through the system. Your blood starts pumping and the machine works out all the kinks.

What is DOSE?
DOSE stands for Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins. These are the mood-boosting Happy Chemicals that are created in your body to reward you with good feelings for doing something good for your survival. Here is a basic breakdown of each one:

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Happiness Starts with a Good Sleep Routine

Happiness Starts with a Good Sleep Routine
Your day begins the night before. It's like shutting down a computer properly. If done wrong, it tends to have bugs and crash unexpectedly. Developing a good sleep routine is important for feeling more productive and motivated the next day without unexpected crashes.

Here are a few quick tips to help you sleep better tonight for a happier tomorrow:
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Make Every Experience Enjoyable with the Flow Formula

Make Every Experience Enjoyable with the Flow Formula
You may have heard the term, "get into the flow," which is when things just seem to click, but what is it really?

What is FLOW?
Flow is often described as our state of mind when we are so involved in an enjoyable activity that nothing else seems to matter. A good example is getting involved in a good novel. You block out everything around you and are fully engulfed in the story.

Flow is an enjoyable experience that we tend to "fall into" by accident, but what if we could create flow around every activity in our lives to create a series of enjoyable experiences every single day? What would your life look like? Work wouldn't be boring, tedious tasks would be fulfilling, and dreaded experiences could be, well, enjoyable.

How Can We Create Flow Everyday?
While it seems simple when it "just happens," creating flow takes conscious effort to develop a habit. It is a process of achieving happiness through control over your inner life.

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The 3 Reasons I Choose to Never Retire

The 3 Reasons I Choose to Never Retire
Retirement...that magical time when all of our dreams come true! We are conditioned to work through the prime of our lives, building up this pile of money, then when we finally reach that magical age when the kids are on their own, we get to go do aaalll the things we've dreamed of doing. You know, the pictures we've looked at for forty years on our cubicle wall hoping and waiting for. 

But there's a problem, several actually. We're not as young as we used to be. The dreams we had when we were 25 are not entirely possible at 65. We contributed to our retirement fund and the stock market didn't pay out like it was supposed to. We're now on a fixed income and to qualify for the meager amount that we've stockpiled for 40 years, we're not allowed to supplement. All the dreaming and planning was for nothing.

It's a rigged system and I refuse to be part of it. I will never retire. I figured this out at age 40 and decided to screw the system and start living my life while I still could. 

Here are my top 3 reasons why I won't retire and what I'm doing instead
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