A strategy to enhance your life

Helen F. McKay’s new book, “Links to Your Happiness”, offers a simple strategy to help you discover what makes you happy. Having triumphed over adversity and trauma, Helen examines happiness and unhappiness.

Wrapped around some personal stories, she discusses: lifestyle comparisons, stress, unhappiness, dissatisfaction and perfectionism, and the need for changes to perceptions. She talks about the benefits of providing space to relax and develop creativity, synchronicity and the importance of colour and texture to an individual’s happiness.

Helen offers a simple strategy to help people escape unhappiness, resulting from the escalating problems of youth suicide, dysfunctional family situations, addictions, violence, religious intolerance, serious indebtedness and unfulfillable cravings for material possessions, which present us with unhappy consequences for our current global society.

She believes we need to find a way to get off this treadmill of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. People can easily become stuck in a time warp: chronically focussed on past problems, traumas and unhappy experiences, so they are unable to move on. To become happier, they need to refocus: to learn to appreciate the good things that are happening in the present.

In “Links to Your Happiness”, Helen suggests a strategy for a more positive existence. By following her suggestions, it’s possible to refocus: become more optimistic and lead a happier, healthier life. The book reveals excerpts from Helen and her friend’s Happy Books, with which readers can identify, and she encourages readers to record daily, the happy experiences that come to mind.

She tells of the Happy book’s evolution from a friend’s personal habit, to one, a host of friends and family use. A growing army of family, friends and acquaintances, on whom these ideas have been field-tested, have managed to achieve this change, after practising the simple strategy – the regular use of a Happy book.

The contents of “Links to Your Happiness” include the importance of:

• Feel – tactile experience in handling the Happy book to enhance mood,
• Look – vibrant happy colours used in the fabric covers of the Happy books,
• Regular recording of simple, everyday experiences, to combat blue moods.
• Reading back through the Happy Book’s pages and choosing something to do.

This strategy has been used by Helen and her associate – along with their families and friends – and found to help develop more positive attitudes; making lives happier, despite all the challenging situations that can arise.

Helen is happy to talk to community groups, about “Links to Your Happiness”. Recently, Helen read sample pages from her friend’s and her personal Happy Books that kindled memories among her audience. Volunteers later shared stories of their happy experiences - a truly happy event!