Practical Happiness Book Review

We're three months into the new year! How are you doing with your New Year's Resolutions? If being happier in 2022 was one of your goals, and you need some extra support to achieve that goal, then check out Pamela Gail Johnson's Practical Happiness: Four Principles to Improve Your Life. Johnson is the founder of the Society of Happy People, an organization that encourages people to celebrate happiness and talk about being happy when they are.


In this book, Johnson takes you through ways to find the happiness that is already in you. She helps you identify "happiness zappers" and how to overcome them. Each chapter includes space for you to answer questions about your own happiness and happiness zappers, identify stressors, and create a plan of action to live a life of practical happiness.

I dog-eared so many pages in this book, partly so I could remember to return to that spot and answer the questions when I had more time, but also because there were a lot of great takeaways in this book. I really liked one person's suggestion to use the acronym False Evidence Appearing Real to overcome fear (p59). In that same chapter, there's a section on controlling happiness zappers, and in some cases, we have to realize that some things are out of our control: "When the only thing we can control is creating a contingency plan for the possibility that the worst happens, after we've done that, we need to let it go and instead focus on what's going right (p76).

I encourage you to pick up this book if you're looking for more ways to find happiness in your life. Even if you think you're a fairly happy person, we all have happiness zappers (stress, annoyances, fear, chaos, general unhappiness), and this book helps you identify and overcome them.

Now that I've read through this book once, I'm excited to go back to certain pages and explore the book even more.

Practical Happiness is published by Health Communications, Inc., and is available to purchase now. I received a free review copy.


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