Mayo Clinic Scientist Reveals the Secret to Happiness in Four Simple Steps

BOSTON, June 9, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- As the Daily Mail revealed last night, a group at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota has determined four key steps to achieving happiness.

Dr. Amit Sood, who leads a team of researchers at Mayo, believes happiness is a choice and, in fact, says that forty to fifty percent of people's happiness rests on the deliberate decisions they make day after day. 

Dr. Sood has taken the four-steps and developed a comprehensive ten-week program to change your mindset and let a positive attitude become habit.  The program is outlined in the new book The Mayo Clinic Handbook for Happiness: A 4-Step Plan for Resilient Living which puts forth practical guidelines that are easy to implement into mundane moments—while waiting for an elevator, or folding laundry.

1. Train Your Attention: Learning to focus your attention enables you to command your thoughts and shift perspective.
2. Cultivate Emotional Resilience: Build inner emotional strength by making room for gratitude, compassion, acceptance, meaning, and forgiveness.
3. Start a Mind-Body Practice: Deepen your spiritual awareness through meditation, prayer, or any other mind-body practices that work for you.
4. Pick Healthy Habits: Direct your willpower to making positive, concrete changes to lead to a healthier you—eat well, exercise, worry less.

With this new book, Dr. Sood expands on the standards he set forth in The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-free Living which Dr. Daniel Goleman called "an important innovative approach to well-being."  Both books are published by Da Capo Lifelong Books/Da Capo Press, a division of the Perseus Books Group.

Dr. Amit Sood is a professor of medicine and the chair of the Mind-Body Medicine Initiative at Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit worldwide leader in medical care, research, and education.

SOURCE Da Capo Press