Happier Now: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Embrace Everyday Moments (Even the Difficult Ones)

Experience more joy and meaning each day—and have greater resilience when times get tough

What if you could be happier, right now, without radically changing your life? As nationally recognized happiness expert Nataly Kogan teaches, happiness is not a nice feeling or a frivolous extra. It’s a critical, non-negotiable ingredient for living a fulfilling, meaningful, and healthy life—and it’s a skill that we can all learn and improve through practice. In Happier Now, Nataly shares an illuminating, inspiring, and science-based guide to help you build your happier skills and live with more joy, starting now.

Nataly’s own journey from Russian refugee to successful investor, tech executive, and founder and CEO of Happier taught her an important lesson: no matter how much you accomplish, how much you live the "right" way, or even how much gratitude you practice, life won’t always be smooth. "We experience genuine and lasting happiness when we stop trying to turn the negative into the positive," Nataly writes, "and when we embrace the full range of our human emotions with compassion and strength."

Throughout this engaging guide, Nataly describes how she went from being cynical and resistant to the ideas behind self-improvement and spirituality, to studying everything she could on the science of happiness, to completely shifting her mind-set. You’ll learn five core practices for building your happier skills—acceptance, gratitude, intentional kindness, knowing your bigger why, and self-care—along with the scientific research that supports each one.

Highlights include:

Daily Anchors—Cultivate a custom set of simple daily practices, fine-tuned for your emotional health needs
• Bring more joy and meaning into your life as it is—without needing to make difficult or time-consuming changes
• How happiness leads to many of the things you want in life, rather than results from them
• Learn an effective five-minute happier workout for whenever you need a boost
• Strengthen your "emotional immune system" so you can be okay when times are tough—and bounce back to happy sooner
• Specific instructions for tools and techniques that work—based on what’s actually happening in your brain
• Effective exercises, journaling prompts, and key insights for developing each core happier skill
As Nataly says: "It’s time to stop saying ‘I’ll be happy when . . .’ and start saying ‘I’m happier now because . . .’"

Nataly Kogan is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author on a mission to help millions of people cultivate their happier skills by making simple, scientifically backed practices part of their daily life. Nataly immigrated to the US as a refugee from the former Soviet Union when she was 13 years old. Starting her life in the projects and on welfare, she went on to reach the highest levels of corporate success at companies like McKinsey & Company and Microsoft. When she still found herself unfulfilled, Nataly set out to discover what really leads to a fulfilling, happier life. Her explorations led her to create Happier, a company whose award-winning mobile application, online courses, and “Happier at Work” training programs have helped more than a million people improve their emotional health.

Nataly is a sought-after keynote speaker and has appeared in hundreds of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TEDxBoston, SXSW, The Harvard Women’s Leadership Conference, and The Dr. Oz Show. She is a self-taught abstract artist and a devoted yogi. Nataly lives with her husband Avi and daughter Mia outside of Boston, although Nataly will always be a New Yorker at heart. For more, visit happier.com.

Nataly Kogan
Nataly Kogan is a successful entrepreneur, sought-after keynote speaker, and the founder and CEO of Happier Inc., a company that has helped more than one million people live happier lives. She and her work have been featured in hundreds of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TEDx, and The Dr. Oz Show. For more, visit natalykogan.com.