W. Doyle Gentry

For most people, anger creates physical sensations that tempt them to explode. But before you open your mouth, take a look at ten ways to cool down. Then see how to express yourself more effectively with assertiveness. Learn about anger’s dos and don’ts, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief. Finally, check out some tips for managing work conflicts.

Happiness is an important part of life — no less than anger, sadness, and fear. But how do you know if you're happy? Are you as happy as most people? If you have lots of money or a fancy title at work, shouldn't that be enough to make you happy? Discover how balancing your life is one way to achieve overall happiness.

Perhaps you want to be happier this coming year. Being happier is a common New Year’s resolution. Although happiness is not entirely a state of mind, positive thinking can help make you a happier person. Here are ten thoughts that lead to happiness: Life is ahead of you — and that’s where your focus should be: People who are weighed down by the past are rarely happy.

A happy couple is one where the two partners retain their own separate, individual identities while working together to meet life’s many challenges and accomplish mutual goals. This is sometimes difficult to do, but if you both want it to work, it usually will. A minister refused to continue the traditional marriage ritual where the bride and groom light a joint candle — symbolizing their union — and extinguish their respective individual candles.

There are three core components to a coherent life, without which it’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve happiness. These components are order, affiliation, and meaning. Each of these components is important in its own right, but it’s the combination of the three that determines where you fall on the continuum of coherence.

Often, people confuse social support with a social network. Support has to do with the quality of your relationships with those closest to you — family, spouse, friends, children, neighbors — and, at its best, reflects a state of intimacy or emotional connection with others. A network, on the other hand, simply defines how many such relationships you have (the quantity).

You have to work to achieve happiness — the greater and more consistent the effort, the greater the eventual reward. Here are ten simple, effective strategies that, if you make them part of your daily routine, will help you reach your goal of a life full of positive emotion.Think of these important points as prescriptions, think of them as the ten secrets to a happy life, think of them as the Ten Commandments of Happiness, think of them anyway you like — just make sure you turn thinking into action!

Family happiness requires balance. There is a movie that shows how a mother bear gives her total attention to her cubs for one year…and then abruptly chases them up a tree, leaving them to survive on their own. Humans take a little longer to make sure their offspring can live on their own (autonomy) and with others (interdependence).

Daily confessions can be a good start toward being happy. Psychology in general concerns itself with how and what human beings think, how they feel, and how and why they behave the way they do. Positive psychology does the same thing — only it focuses on positive thoughts, positive emotions, and positive ways of acting toward others.