One of my close friends really struggles to be happy. He’s a worrier by nature. He almost always has something negative in his life to worry about (don’t we all?), and if there isn’t anything obvious he seems to create worries. It’s just the way he’s made. He worries about things that might never even happen. What if his wife’s illness turns out to be more serious than it seems? What if the company decides to make redundancies and he’s in the firing line? What if interest rates rise and he can’t afford the mortgage?

But he doesn’t have to settle for a life of constant worry. Remember how habit-forming happiness is, along with thought patterns. If you can change your thoughts, you’ll change your mood. Change them for long enough, and you’ll change your prevailing mood. The good news is that, if you’re persistent, there are lots of ways to change your thought patterns. I’m going to give you a couple of suggestions, and you can take it from there.

First of all, it’s great to have some kind of occupation that you can’t worry through. It might be sport, gardening, playing with the kids, building model trains, reading, work, baking, tracing your family tree, organizing your stamp collection, you name it. Anything that works for you. If there are times you’re especially prone to think negative thoughts – on the train to work, say – find a distraction that suits. Do crosswords, knit, plan work in a notebook. The only proviso here is not to pick something potentially addictive to you, such as drinking or computer games or gambling. This isn’t the time to create a new problem.

There will still be times when you worry or dwell on miserable thoughts and you don’t have a ready distraction. So you need to find a thinking-only solution. The critical thing here is to catch yourself thinking negatively, and say to yourself, ‘Ha! Got you. Stop it at once!’ Then you need to offer your mind an alternative train of thought or it will go back to its old ways. How about having a ‘happy thought’ you use in these circumstances, that you just switch into? For example, the plot of the novel you’re writing in your head, a daydream about scoring the winning goal, planning the design of the house you want to build as soon as you have the money, working out the intricacies of a new computer game you’d like to invent, planning a knockout report for your boss that will get you instant promotion . . . you get the idea.

Finally, you may find it helps to consider the upside of whatever is worrying you. This doesn’t work for all things, but suppose you’re worried about being made redundant. Why not think about all the opportunities this will give you, and all the plus sides to it? The irritating colleagues you’ll never have to see again, the long commute you can give up, the chance to start your own business or change careers or move out of the city? Once you learn the art of self-distraction, you’ll find it much easier to deal with less-than-happy thoughts.