🎈 How to Get Happier Day by Day

I believe this is the most important question I’ve ever asked myself.

How can each day of my existence lead to an incremental rise in my happiness?

This may just be the most important article I’ve ever written. Enjoy!

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Logically, every day you should learn to live better for the next day. You should become less self-conscious, egotistical, unhappy, and stuck-up.

Every day is a day of practice for becoming a better version of yourself.

Obviously, the reality is very different. As people age, they generally become less lighthearted and joyful. They lose their youthfulness. And they may not be as happy as when they were young.

This doesn’t make sense, given that older people have more time to practice living well. There must be something wrong.

Well, there is. Humans don’t approach life with intentionality—by applying a strategy for improving their next day and the next version of themselves.

For most, they enjoy being unconscious far too much to start approaching life with self-examination… With the question, how can I actually get happier?

But for some, they don’t know how to make the “progress made each day” stick. How can you solidify your lessons so that tomorrow is better than today?

This is the question I want to answer for you today. And I will give you my approach.

First, some theory. Each day, you have time to improve your life and brain. Some days, you make progress. You implement a change, you learn something, you have an insight about your life. Often, this progress is lost. We’re going to talk about how to capture this progress so that each day is progressive.

If you improve 1% every day, you’ll be 37 times better at the end of the year. So it pays off to make incremental improvements.

I’m going to equip you with my system for doing so. But first, I want to share with you the aspects of human nature that make this difficult.

There are four default neural circuits you must overcome to adopt my approach to incremental happiness:

1. **Forgetting**: Most humans forget almost everything within 24 hours. You can’t change if you forget how you wanted to change.

2. **Pleasure-seeking**: The allure of instant gratification prevents you from cultivating willpower, grit, and physical energy. These three traits are essential for anything, really.

3. **Responding to the environment**: One of the greatest predictors of behavior is your environment—social and physical. If the environment doesn’t change, you likely won’t change.

4. **Self-sabotaging**: It’s really easy and fun to be unhealthy in today’s world. But when your body is inflamed, malnourished, or sleep-deprived, you make poor choices for your future self, leading to a downward spiral.

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Imagine a day of my life has passed, and on this day, I learned a lot. I had some powerful experiences. I read a book. I had an impactful conversation. The first step is reflecting on these experiences.

To identify the progress of yesterday, I must reflect on yesterday.

This is how I start my day. I wake up and go on my audio-journaling walk. I process the previous day’s events from start to finish. I recall everything I learned. I identify new behaviors I want to start. I compare my actions yesterday with the actions of my ideal self.

**Key Habit #1 — Reflect on Yesterday.**

But it’s not enough to merely reflect. I must identify the lessons of yesterday and implement them. That’s why I write down the mindsets and behaviors from yesterday that I want to repeat today. Specifically, I identify ‘trigger-action’ pairs I want to program into my brain. More on this later.

**Key Habit #2 — Document Changes.**

At the end of each day, I go through a closing checklist. I ask myself a series of questions about the day before even going to bed.

What new habits do I want to implement? What must I put into action? Who did I meet today? I write down the answers and eventually add them to an external brain—a sheet of paper or spreadsheet that I interact with daily. This ensures I get reminders every day about what I wanted to change about my life. Nothing is lost.

My external brain prevents me from forgetting. It's a database of actionable insights from the day. One thing I emphasize in my documentation is actionability. Theories are great, behaviors are better.

These can be physical behaviors, cognitive behaviors, or social behaviors.

Physical: An action that I do alone, usually for my health.

Cognitive: An action that happens in my head.

Social: An action that happens toward someone around me.

**Key Habit #3 — Program Yourself.**

Part of my external brain is a database of habits in the form of ‘if then’ statements. My version of a habit is defined as a trigger or cue paired with an action. I’ll call these trigger-action pairs (TAPs) from now on.

The cue triggers the action. Cues can be any form of stimulus in your world, including your own thoughts. Because the goal is to make happiness automatic and habitual, you want your brain to learn to recognize cues in the environment for specific physical, cognitive or social behaviors.

An example of a cognitive TAP I discovered during a retreat is this: whenever I make eye contact with other humans, I remember their mortality in my head. There’s no physical action, all mental. Another goes like this: When something goes wrong (trigger), I think of how much worse it could have gone (cognitive action). This TAP keeps me grateful for my life.

Your brain is learning TAPs whether you like it or not. If you let go of control, negative TAPs will be reinforced. Having an intentionally-TAPed brain is a much more frictionless approach to happiness. Intentional TAPs are the path to programming a happy brain.

Ultimately, key habits number one (reflection) and number two (documentation) have the goal of identifying TAPs = behaviors that improve your life and mood. It's then possible to slowly integrate these TAPs into your brain through daily reminders from your external brain and by incorporating cues into your environment.

As you identify more and more of TAPs, you will program your brain to behave in the correct way and to perceive the world like a happy person would. Your brain becomes a cue recognition system.

**Key Habit #4 — Upgrade Your Environment.**

Without an environment with cues, your TAPs won’t get reinforced or activated.

We've addressed barrier number one, forgetting. Let's now address barrier number two, responding to the environment. Your social and physical environments are the guardrails for your behavior. It's very challenging to resist an Oreo every single day when it's on the counter with a warm glass of milk next to it.

Part of the reflection process and documentation process is identifying ways to change your environment. It's not just about collecting TAPs but about identifying actions you can take to change your environment.

Physical Environment

Specifically, what I mean by changing your environment is incorporating cues for habits into your environment, and removing cues for negative behaviors. How can you make it easier for your ideal TAPs to get activated?

Here’s an example: I pre-make a smoothie before I go to bed and eat it first thing in the morning. This helps me with my goal of pushing my eating window earlier into the day. I create the cue for a morning meal.

Another example. If you wanted to start working out, you could change your physical environment by laying out your gym clothes beside your bed. When you wake up in the morning, your gym clothes are ready to go and you automatically put them on and leave for the gym.

Even better, you could purchase fitness equipment for your home so that the friction to work out is even less. All you have to do is walk toward your equipment and start working out.

Every day, your environment can become more conducive to your happiness. By identifying incremental improvements to your social and physical environment, you can activate your TAPs more often and build a better brain.

Thus, the goal of key habit #1 reflection is to identify both TAPs and environmental changes you can make to reinforce those habits.

Social Environment

But, it's not just the physical environment, it's also the social environment. We are a tribal species. We respond to social cues. We are either encouraged or discouraged by others.

Let me tell you the truth. You won't get happier every day if you're surrounded by people who don't want you to get better. Who don’t want you to become the best version of yourself. Who judge your love for self-improvement. People who are threatened by your success and self improvement.

Ask yourself, do these people really nurture me? Do they positively influence me? Higher selectivity around relationships is better for improving your happiness day by day.

In my life, I'm always aware of how people make me feel and what parts of myself they encourage or discourage. My family encourages me to be a conformist follower, so I limit my time with them. They are not helping me get happier day by day. Except for challenging my patience and mindfulness.

My club about high-performance inspires me to exercise more, develop more open-mindedness, and learn more about my body’s metrics. I built this club intentionally to help me get happier day by day.

What are the cues in your social environment? Are there cues to self-sabotage, be sedentary, complain about life, or check out of life? Audit your relationships, especially who you choose to marry.

Professional Environment

Your financial and professional environment also impact your happiness. Let’s say during my reflection of yesterday, I complain about my job. This is a sign that I should work toward a career or workplace that I love. Developing a life purpose should not be underestimated.

If how you make money is drudgery to you, you must change that part of your environment… slowly but surely. Let me use my life as an example.

During my last year of university, I worked at two biotech companies as an intern. Here, I realized that a 9-5 corporate job was not going to make me happy. So I become a beach lifeguard and Airbnb host. My expenses were nearly zero, so I was able to live off this income without working an ordinary job. In all my spare time, I threw sober parties. Eventually it started to generate income for me.

Eventually, companies hired me to lead wellness experiences for their teams. Then conferences. Today, my greatest source of income is public speaking. I slowly changed my professional environment. Now I live my dream.

Creating an environment where you don’t have to sacrifice your happiness for money is the end goal. To do this, you must slowly transition. That’s how I did it.

I share all of this with one caveat — I have met Hippies who don’t have a career and are broke as hell. Yet, they're happier than me. They are happier with less. It’s impressive. It inspires me.

**Key Habit #5 — Review Your TAPs.**

You must practice ‘spaced repetition’ if you want your TAPs to stick. This means reviewing a select few every evening a part of your evening shut down.

You only have to review the ones you haven’t successfully established yet. For me, this takes less than a minute of my time.

Let’s recap.

1. Daily reflection leads to new TAPs and environmental changes.

2. Documentation in my external brain enables me to slowly incorporate these changes into my life.

3. Changes to my environment activate my TAPs more often.

4. I surround myself with others who inspire me to implement better and bigger habits.

5. I review TAPs that I haven’t successfully implemented every evening.

Slowly, your brain will start to recognize the cues in your environment. Then you have a choice, do the action OR…

Self-sabotage and pursue pleasure!

The whole process is conditional on self-restraint. The world is filled with shiny objects and social conditioning telling you to desire bullshit. To get happier day by day and establish the habits that nurture you, you must break free from the matrix and change what you desire.

Why reflect on yesterday when you can watch TV?

Why use your phone intentionally when you can use it to entertain yourself?

Why meditate when you can drink alcohol instead?

The first step is becoming a pleasure skeptic.

The irony of living a life of instant shallow gratification is that you'll feel empty inside most of the time. There's plenty of research to back this up. Deeper, long-term pleasure is the way. So first, you must change your beliefs around pleasure and become critical of the pleasure you are seeking. Is it deep pleasure or shallow pleasure?

The goal is not to forsake pleasure. It’s to become skeptical of it. Most pleasures won't give you the progress you desire, but some pleasures will.

For me, my greatest pleasure is throwing sober parties, and this is encouraged by my social environment and physical environment. I have friends who love dancing and I own sound equipment—it’s easy for me to throw a party. I’ve integrated this healthy pleasure into my life.

And this pleasure is deep, natural, and nourishing. It’s my natural antidepressant.

Second, change your environment so that you can’t self-sabotage.