Short term happiness is determined by how much what is happening meets or exceeds your expectations.
Long term happiness is determined by how much happiness you can feel no matter what is happening.
You can immediately increase your level of short term and long term happiness by changing your expectation about what each new moment means.
In the situations in your life, instead of asking yourself:
“How can this make me happier?”
Try changing the question to:
“How can I bring more happiness to this?”
When you change your expectation from trying to get happiness from every situation (short term happiness), to experiencing it as an opportunity to get better at feeling more happiness no matter what happens (long term happiness), you can immediately feel happier in the current situation AND you are becoming better at being happier long term at the same time!
Then you might discover two things:
Bringing more happiness to the situation instead of expecting it to bring happiness to you, puts you in a much better position to help the situation improve AND
The worse a situation is, the bigger the opportunity you have to experience long term happiness.
-Andy