Living In Happiness?
How often do you hear people say they want to live a happy life in our contemporary world? We live like happiness comes from external circumstances or material possessions. As if good feelings will come with certain daily life happenings. What if we could free ourselves from those thoughts and just BE happy?
Your brain wants to be happy. A happy brain is a healthy brain and a healthy brain is a happy brain. As Psychology Today states: "Happiness promotes the growth of nerve connections, improves your ability to think, affects your view of your surroundings and leads to more happy thoughts."
Happiness is something that everyone wants to achieve. And yet, many people are challenged to find it, especially in the times in which we live. Why is that? Is it because we don't really try? Or perhaps it's because we try too much? It could be that looking for happiness is like getting in your car and driving around town, in search of your car.
Ancient wisdom on happiness would suggest "control what you can and ignore the rest," or "except and stop denying" plus "you are responsible for your life." All wise words, positive quotes, and a path to happiness and yet mostly forgotten in our contemporary life.
The thing about happiness, like many things in life, is that the more you chase it or want and desire it, the more it will be out of reach.
Happy Thoughts Lead To Happy Surroundings
The lovely woman that I've lived with for a good number of years had a kind of mantra about happiness: "I just want to be happy," she would say to herself, as well as to me. Well, that sounds like a very happy goal but when you think about it, only someone whose not happy would want to be happy.
She repeated her happiness mantra for decades. As long as she was saying she wanted to be happy it was like a self-judgement or self-fulfilling prophecy about her life. As long as you're desiring happiness, in that moment you're not being happy. Considering we only live in the present moment, her wanting happiness was creating unhappiness.
She wasn't alone in her unhappiness. For years, before we met, my unhappiness and suffering meter frequently overtook my happiness meter. I lived a good life back then but my frequency of difficulty and the sense of unhappiness was slowly crowding out my good times and happy thoughts, of course leading to negative emotions.
Why was this the case? Because I was depending on the circumstances around me to save me. I lived in the past, thinking: "Why did it happen that way? It should have been better! I got a raw deal." But I was mostly living in the future: "t will be great when...when I meet the right woman, get that career, make all that money." Etc.
Then, we had kids, two in fact. Their lives became a classroom for me. Soon, I began to notice their most important and unspoken goal in life. That goal is to have as much fun as possible and play for as long as they can. Definitely activities of happy little people. Activities in the moment.
Sure they have their moments, their breakdowns and tantrums, but those things are simply their emotional release valves. Through my fatherly experience, I watched them always get back up and gravitate toward the fun and play and the happiness that ensues.
So happiness isn't realized or experienced in some desire of a time-related happening, but by merely being in the here and now. As the kids of this world demonstrate, it's naturally human.
If you're looking for happiness, stop chasing after happiness. Instead, you need to find happiness within yourself. It's not going to come from outside. Sure that new car, that new person, that new dog or cat brings the feeling of well-being and happiness but from my experience, it's lasting when it comes from the inside out.
Happiness: Being And Doing
Being happier will lead to going out and doing things leading to other people's happiness which will then lead to greater happiness for you.
1) Be grateful. When you wake up every morning, take a minute to be thankful for everything that has been given to you. I like to look out the window first thing in the morning at the sky or trees and honestly say to myself: "Wow! I get a whole new day."
2) Do something nice for someone else. This is one end of the balanced life principle of being human. Without the selfless factor and caring for others, there can be no lasting happiness. Even something small like recognizing the jobs people do and complimenting them for it. I find this always leads to good feelings.
3) Take care of yourself. This is at the other end of the balanced life principle. Most people have no problem with this self-servitude. However, I know a woman who would exhaust herself from doing things for others. So commendable, but she wasn't happy. She forgot to meditate, or dance or
4) Spend quality time with friends and family, cultivating meaningful relationships. Coming out of the time of the pandemic has left our society more fractured and closed off than before we entered it. That people are less happy points to the importance of our interconnectedness and what means and does for our well-being.
5) Laugh more often. Laughter is contagious. Okay, this is a given. Independent studies have shown that laughing is good for your emotional, mental and physical well-being. That's a measurable impact on your joy!
6) Get in touch with nature. Over the last two years, I've watched approximately 600 sunrises. I'd begin my day immersed in lakefront nature, including sunrises. Being close to nature for the first 15 minutes of my day profoundly impacted my sense of well-being and happiness.
7) Cut yourself some slack! You don't need to be perfect, because you already are. Dictionaries speak of perfection as being an "ideal type." Oh my gosh, that sounds too hard! Or maybe not. After all, could you be any more of an ideal type than who and what you currently are?
8) Thinking of a healthy body. Eat healthy foods, exercise regularly, and sleep well. Your physical activity and health affect your mental state leading to a greater level of satisfaction. Think of creative activities.
9) Practice mindfulness and deep meditation. Mindfulness means paying attention on purpose. It's a meditative process that's good for your mental health and physical health. It can center and focus you on being alive while reducing stress, worry and even blood pressure.
10) Look for things of joy and beauty even in unexpected places. A few years back, I was standing in a plaza parking lot adjacent to a busy highway. I never noticed before that the sound of the many truck and car tires on the pavement speeding by were actually quite beautiful. Something like music. Needless to say, it was a time when I lived in the moment and not in my head.
11) "Let it all go." Make that your daily mantra! It's simple and easy, yet a positive partner to having gratitude.
The Happiest Guy I Know.
Speaking of nature and the happiness it can bring, we have a little slice of nature living with us in our home. His name is Arlo...the dog. I speak of him and his happiness factor in my course Being Paradise.
“If I could be half the person my dog is, I’d be twice the human I am.”—Charles Yu
I didn't want a dog. The kids wanted a dog. Actually, their mother wanted a dog. Wait, to be honest, I realized soon after Arlo arrived that she didn't want a dog, she wanted another kid, but the dog will have to do, for now.
I also realized that Arlo is the happiest guy I know after he arrived. Isn't it funny how when you don't want something the universe gives it to you and you end up learning something big from it? You see, Arlo is happy without trying. It's just in his nature. Sure he has down times, and cranky times but like children, he gravitates toward fun and play. He lives a little positive life.
Happiness: It's Just Not Reasonable
Reasoning is the ability to evaluate something rationally by applying logical principles based on new or existing knowledge. This includes evaluating whether a claim is true or false, determining what actions are appropriate given a situation, and deciding how to act under certain conditions.
It's all so human and all so adult! Reasoning is what the prefrontal cortex in your brain allows you to do. It's your life's command center in your brain. However, how much do you command? Do you have a rational mind or does your rational mind have you? Do you ever really think about thinking, or just do it?
"Battles are first won or lost in the mind." -- Joan of Arc.
In the 1940s in the Bell laboratories scientist, Claude Shannon determined that our brains have the ability to process 10 trillion bits of information per second. He also said that our everyday conscious awareness which runs your life and deciphers whether you are happy or not has the ability to process 15 to 50 bits of data per second.
You read that right, 15 to 50 bits of data! That's 15 to 50 bits of data per second we use to order our world and make judgements about it all as if we know so much. But what do we know, and are we "knowing" our way out of joyful happy life? So, let's compare ourselves to the happiest guy I know...
Arlo The Dog: Happy Beyond Reason
Speaking of knowing, one of the biggest drivers in the human ability to reason is our complex language. Our language is tied to our prefrontal cortex and its capacity to reason. Arlo has a language. It's presented by his mouth in the form of barking and whining but also by his body and mostly his tail.
He recognizes some of our language, English specifically. Through repetition (He's a clever dog so he doesn't need many repetitions) he connects an experience to those language sounds. I'd say he has 10 words or short phrases that he recognizes: "treat," "walk," "cheese," "ball," "Arlo" etc. But does he "know" these words and their meaning or are they recognizable sounds connected to experiences he remembers? Happy memories to him!
From my casual observation of every pet I've lived with, and there have been quite a few, they displayed their own kind of intelligence. But being able to reason and the language connected to that ability appears to be a gift granted to us human beings alone.
How much of a gift is that reasoning? Sure it's gotten us to the moon, given us great medical advancement...and best of all, chocolate cake! But it's also a double edge sword. It has occasionally brought us to dark places within our minds and the actions that grow from those dark mental places.
I speak from personal experience. The times in my life when I could find very little happiness were the times I was living predominately in my brain. I had problems that needed to be solved, wrongs to make right, and changes to be made.
The more I thought in these terms the bigger my issues got, the deeper into my mind I was drawn and the further I got away from Arlo-ology! Problems and solutions, wrongs made right and desires for change don't exist in nature, only in the synapses of the adult human mind. That's not fun. That's not happy.
“I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.” -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Is this our path to happiness? Living more like Arlo and his involuntary happiness program? Putting away the rational mind from time to time and experiencing the positive emotions that follow. Doing this often can be long-term well-being. True happiness.
Arlo is an involuntary being of mindfulness, he has no choice but to live in the now, much like young children. And is there anything happier than when kids and pets get together? Maybe it's time we grownups joined them.
So what have we learned about happiness?
Happiness feeds the brain and makes it more effective, spawns more good feelings.
Your mental constructs of how things should or should be can create dark mind caves. Simply recognizing these caves can free you and contribute to your happiness quotient.
Being in the moment is natural and requires no trying. Watch and learn from those beings of Now-ness.
Comments