Could We Be Any Happier?
I recently ran a poll on my facebook page which asked my readers which one out of four categories (health, money, happiness or time) they would like to have or experience more of (feel free to add your vote!).
It was interesting to see that happiness was in third place out of the four categories, with time and health being more popular and money having no votes at all. Now, given that over 200 people saw the poll, but only 12 people voted, I guess I can’t call it a scientifically proven observation, but for the purposes of putting a blog post together, I find the results quite interesting.
Did the results indicate that happiness isn’t as elusive as we’re led to believe? In other words, we are happy, after all; or, the flipside interpretation could be telling us that if we had better health and more time, we’d feel happier. In reality I put the poll up just for fun, and my observations are just that and don’t take into account the context in which the choice was made so it’s difficult to draw any sound conclusions, but let’s just explore the concept of happiness.
So what is happiness and what makes us happy? Happiness is one of those strange, personal, intangible things that we often don’t notice we’ve experienced until the moment has passed. It’s often compared to catching butterflies, but actually I think a better description would be catching faeries which (depending on your beliefs) are illusory and intangible and to the best of my knowledge have never been caught. They reside only in our imagination and maybe that’s where happiness dwells also, forming part of our perceptions of our life experiences?
It’s customary for us to look to external stimuli to make us happy, for example does waking up on a sunny day make us feel happy?
Living in the UK, sunny days feel quite rare and as a consequence, when the sun shines, it has the effect of lifting my mood appreciably. And I know I’m not unique in having this view, even my 18-year-old daughter commented that ‘everyone feels happier when the sun shines’. But maybe that doesn’t hold true in climates where the sunshine is the rule rather than the exception?
Anticipation can also arouse feelings of happiness in us. Quite often these can be the simple things like planning an evening of me-time and pampering, plans to see a new movie or even just the anticipation of waiting for the lottery numbers to be drawn. The problem with anticipation though is that the outcome can be positive or negative.
Have you ever had the experience of looking forward with excitement and anticipation to, say, a holiday, but the experience never actually lived up to your expectations. Consequently you felt sad and maybe even resentful?
We should be wary to avoid placing too much significance on the ability of external experiences to make us happy. If the weather was a driver for our happiness then we’d always be happy on a sunny day and sad on a cloudy day. But as we know, this isn’t the case as we can experience either emotion, regardless of the weather.
Similarly, meeting up with friends can be great fun and make us happy or it can leave us feeling tired and drained if the friend had some bad news to share.
One would hope of course that most of our external interactions leave us feeling happy, but, as this isn’t always the case it’s important to find out the things which, to a large extent, we can control and which can make us happy.
Speaking form a personal perspective, it’s important to my happiness to experience personal growth. I love to learn. Pushing my personal boundaries is part of who I am and at times when I’ve shied away from doing the things that are part of the authentic me, in other words, when I’ve limited myself, I’ve felt an underlying feeling of guilt, frustration, incompleteness and general sadness.
On the other hand, when I’ve forced myself to take a step into the unknown and to face my fears, I’ve usually felt exhilarated at the outcome, even if the outcome was dreadful! The fact that I’ve addressed my issues and grown beyond them fills me with ‘excited-happiness’, of feeling like I could pop like a balloon at any moment!
And then there are the feelings of ‘contented-happiness’. This kind of happiness is characterised by quiet, self realisation. The best descriptive word I could find was a feeling of sereneness. It’s that contentment we feel when everything just seems to fit together, the waters are calm and there’s no expectation of a storm that will create unwelcome ripples. These feelings are as welcome as those we experience when we’re ‘excited-happy’ and they help to balance our experiences of happiness.
Clearly then it’s important to define the difference between internally and externally generated activities because it can have a profound effect on our long-term happiness and wellbeing.
If our happiness is determined by something or someone external to ourselves, then we will always run the risk of being unhappy. We are all personally responsible for our own wellbeing, both physically and mentally. As Jim Rohn so aptly put it – “No one can do your push-ups for you”, and in this context relying on someone else to make and keep us happy is a recipe for disaster.
As humans we need to keep moving. When we fail to act and progress we become reliant on others for our sense of self-worth and we can become needy. We need others to provide the value to our existence instead of projecting it from within. Productivity and progress gives us the personal ammunition to do this, otherwise we continually beat ourselves up for all the things we haven’t done.
The antidote then is to take action, take control. There are two things we must do therefore, and they are:
- Determine what makes us happy, and,
- Determine what makes us unhappy.
In simple terms, we must do more of the former and less of the latter. In fact, for things that make us unhappy, we should aim to remove it from our lives altogether, or, where this is not possible (I’m fully aware that we all have commitments that make us less than happy!) we should aim to either reduce the amount of time we spend doing it, or do something to reduce the impact it has on our lives.
And here’s why we gain so much from taking control and making progress in our own lives. This is some feedback I’ve received recently from a friend I’ve been working with; I think it speaks for itself!
“so it’s a really Happy Monday! (I’d almost forgotten what it is like to feel like this….I’m liking it!)”
“…now I’ve had a taste of that wonderful/light/hair blowing in the breeze/free spirited/mountain goat like feeling (aka happy – you get my drift!!) it’s motivated me to get to that place more often!”
I hope you’ve enjoyed and maybe been a little bit challenged by this post! Happiness is a serious subject and we all deserve to experience it as often as possible. Happiness doesn’t happen by accident, so if you’re not feeling it often enough, have a look to see where you can make changes.
As always, I love to read your comments, so please let me know what your thoughts are on happiness!
Photo: Liz West
Arwen Lynch, Professional Joy Seeker says
Truly important is the idea that we make ourselves happy. No one else has the power to make us happy or make us sad. It is our reaction that does this. Hard to learn but once you do? JOY!
Nicola says
I agree Arwen. It’s is difficult to learn and also, once it’s known and accepted, very difficult to apply consistently. Thanks for your comment 🙂
Denys Kelley says
I agree that happiness comes from within and we are all responsible for our own happiness. I also think that when we are healthy – it’s easier to be happy.
Nicola says
Indeed Denys. Our happiness levels can be affected by other external forces if we allow them to, although our health can be a driver for how we feel in general. Thanks for popping by 🙂
Kathy Hadley says
Interesting.
In my coaching, I’ve found that almost NO ONE will say money is their top priority. It is probably a pride thing or something. However, once I start coaching someone, money is almost always topic number one.
Why wouldn’t it be? In most people’s minds and lives, money is the thing that pretty much runs everything else….or so they think.
The only reason anyone wants anything is that they think that in the having of it they will be happy. When it is the opposite that is true.
Be happy and that vibration goes out into the Universe and attract more to you to make you be happy more.
Good article.
Kathy
Nicola says
It’s as I thought Kathy, and you have confirmed. I’m a little surprised that money has received no votes on my poll, but had surmised that this was because no one would admit to wanting more. I think it may be ingrained in us from an early age to think that it’s greedy to want more money, when in reality, we could do so much more and help so many other people if we had more. Thanks for your comment 🙂