Do you want more happiness? Has the joy of life fallen flat? Do you find yourself in an emotional funk? Have the happy days become a thing of the past?

I just may have the answer to your happiness blues: Increase your passion.

Ask Yourself These Questions

1. What gets you excited?
2. What do you look forward to doing every day?
3. What brings you immense joy or a sense of purpose or meaning?
4. What are you passionate about?

Passion is Required for Happiness; None for Boredom and Indifference

If  you found these questions difficult to answer, your life just may need a little tuning that can make a huge difference in how you experience life. Happy people are passionate people. They both live life passionately, and have things in their lives for which they have passion. This helps keep life interesting. The alternative to an impassioned life, after all, is an indifferent one of boredom.

There is, therefore, a huge difference in the quality of life enjoyed by someone who dreads getting up to begin their day and someone who dreads having to go to sleep to end it.

What is the difference between the two? There may be more than one difference. But it is also the degree to which one feels passionate about life or a cause or a calling. What is the effect of such differences in passion? One has a deeper sense of joy, a greater, more durable happiness, a greater sense of purpose and meaning for living than the other.

5 Ways to Increase the Joy of Passion

1. Learn something new everyday. Hunger for education. Thirst for knowledge. Develop the yearning to learn and to know and to understand. Be curious about life and people and history and nature, about the human capacity to build and improve and advance. Quantum physics and quantum mechanics, medicine, law, science, philosophy and psychology. There is just so darn much to learn about and so little time to learn it all. So get started!

Be curious. Be curious about life and why people do the things they do. Wonder about the workings of governments and the atom. Ask questions about life and God and the universe. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also created hospitals and libraries and computers and jet engines and universities and the cell phone. One day it will cure cancer and further shrink the world in incalculable ways.

2. Do something you’ve never done. Plan something each day or week or month. Climb a mountain. Eat Thai food. Strike up a conversation on an elevator. Go on a weekend road trip. Read a novel. Write a short story. Write a poem. Jump rope. Cook French cuisine. Learn to ballroom dance. Go on a horseback ride.

The point is to add a little variety to life and get a feel for the alternative. You can’t become passionate about what you’ve never been introduced to. As you try new things, you just may find a passion out there made to fit. Or, you may develop a passion for trying new things itself.

3. Develop your artistic or creative side. If lessons are too expensive for your budget right now, YouTube it, research it online or buy a book about it. Learn to paint or read poetry. Learn woodworking, guitar, piano or the oboe. Pick up photography or swing dance, the ukulele or blogging. There is so much out there to get excited about. So go get excited! Feed your creative side! What you do is far less important than choosing something to do and then getting started.

4. Join a group or organization or forum dedicated to those things you love. Being around or communicating with like-minded people is not only very therapeutic, others’ passion can rub off on yours. Did you know there is an international Left-handers Club? (http://www.lefthandersday.com/about-club.html) and a Celebrity Impersonators Convention?

Passion breeds passion, so get together with those who share your likes and interests and just maybe you’ll soon discover more passion in your life and more satisfaction and a greater sense of joy because if it. So, join a gym, go to church, join a service club like Lions Club or an Elks Lodge, or go put on a pair of Spock ears and hitch a ride to the next Star Trek Convention!

5. Get a hobby. See #s 1 – 4 for ideas. Gardening, model airplanes, a sport, boating, ice skating, extreme couponing, scrap-booking, reading, cupcake baking, juggling, whatever. Then get enthused about it. Learn more about it. Tell others about it. Write a book about it. Blog about it. Get downright passionate about it!

6. Decide to be more passionate. Make every day’s level of passion a choice. Passion is not what happens to you. It is the attitude you choose to have as we confront and interact with the world.

I can wake up, ho-hum around the house until the last-minute I can leave and still probably get to work pretty close to on time. I can take long breaks and lunches, look for ways to waste time and clock out at the end of the day just as the minute hand hits the appropriate time, then turn on the TV and vegetate until bedtime.

Or I can choose to make life matter. I can choose to do something today. I can choose to make a difference today. I can reach out to someone in a worse place than I am and extend myself a little bit. I can love more and be more grateful, get excited more and enthused more often about more things.

Afterthoughts

Happy people are passionate about uplifting and enjoyable things. Life is an adventure and the happiest people love the process as much as anything else. So go find something that sparks your curiosity. Learn it, get good at it, then reap the rewards of a truly passionate life.

It won’t be long before you realize a passionate life is also a life that is happy and filled with more joy and satisfaction.

How has passion helped you find more joy? What would you add to my list? How have you increased passion in your life? What are you passionate about? Please comment!