Lying, cheating or stealing for personal gain may give you a short-term feeling of happiness, but over the long run these actions will make you very unhappy. While these actions may not always hurt others, they will always hurt you. When you act without integrity, you end up spending an enormous amount of energy denying the actions were wrong—either by constantly pushing them out of your mind or by thinking things like, “They can afford it,” “She won’t really notice,” or “They deserve it.” The problem is when an action doesn’t have integrity, it will continually rise to the surface and niggle at you and prevent you from having a happy, peaceful mind.

Excerpted from the book How to Be Happy NOW…Even if Things Aren’t Going Your Way, available on Amazon.com or Amazon UK,  CA, FR , IT, ES and DE. © 2013 Sara Weston. A FREE excerpt of the book is available here.