You Want To Be Happy? Great. What Are You Doing About It?
If you think you can find happiness in a new car, a new handbag, or by putting a ring on your finger, you might be disappointed. Hey, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I hate to see people waste their time kidding themselves.
Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not anti-cars, I love a new handbag just like the next girl, and I think weddings are a great excuse for a party if nothing else.
However, these things usually only make you happy for a short time. If you don’t take responsibility for your continued happiness, the elation you feel when you get that special something will soon disappear.
Happiness isn’t something you own or touch
Like love, happiness isn’t simply something that you can buy or get, although we often think of it as if it were something tangible, a physical object in our possession.
But it isn’t.
It’s more like water that you try to cup in your hands. It slowly drips away, slipping through your fingers, however tightly you press them together. You have to work hard to keep it topped up and not end up empty-handed.
This hard work is yours and yours alone. Your happiness is your responsibility.
I deserve to be happy
Some of us have this notion that we’re entitled to happiness: “I’ve got a well-paid job, a nice house, the partner I wanted. I should be happy”.
No happiness is guaranteed by simply having those things.
That gorgeous new handbag will not make you happy for long. Nor will having that incredible car. There will always be another, fancier bag after that, another faster car. You’ll stop appreciating what you already have and start wanting version 2.0 instead.
If you look to something – or someone – else to fulfil your happiness, you will never find it.
When we expect to find happiness through someone or something else, all we’re doing is handing over responsibility for our happiness to that other thing or person.
Do you really want to rely on someone else to make you happy?
If, if, if…
Of course, it’s easier to blame someone else if you’re not happy. But it’s not anyone else’s job to make you contented. It’s yours.
It took me many years – decades – to understand this. I cringe, thinking back to past relationships where I expected my boyfriend to behave a certain way, to be who I wanted him to be, believing that would make me happier.
Have you ever complained, or heard someone else complain: If he just loved me I would be happy… If my father just respected me… If my boss just appreciated me… If, if, if…
In all of these cases, we’re passing responsibility for our happiness over to someone else.
Here’s the problem though: we can’t control other people. The only things we can control are our own thoughts and actions.
This isn’t a new idea. Ancient philosophers like Epictetus and Seneca taught us this over two thousand years ago.
They understood that happiness is a mindset, not simply something we acquire from the world around us.
Once we stop trying to control things outside of ourselves, we can start controlling the things we do genuinely have dominion over.
This is fantastic news because it means there’s nothing stopping you from taking the reins and focussing on what you can do to make your life more content.
How to feel happier: do the work
Innumerable studies have shown how different techniques can improve our level of happiness. I’m not going into them in any depth here: I’m more concerned with the importance of accepting responsibility for our own happiness.
What I will say though is that a combination of these methods compounds to improve a feeling of contentedness: appreciate what you have, stop hankering after what you don’t have, and focus on what you have control over. Try a combination of
- gratitude journaling
- meditation
- exercise
- reframing your thoughts
- mindfulness
- emotional intelligence skills
- creating good habits
- mindset: changing the way you think about happiness
All of these techniques are effective, but many of us fail to put them into practice. They take effort and consistency, two things we humans are excellent at avoiding.
Nurture your happiness
Happiness has to be nurtured and cared for like a garden, watered with love and pruned from time to time or else the weeds will take over and choke out the flowers. The bad news is, you can’t hire a gardener to do that work for you. Come rain or shine, wind or snow, you need to tend it, in person.
Start practising acceptance and letting go of what you can’t control. This might sound like a cliche but it is the truth.
Don’t fight with the past. This is another hard-learned lesson from my own life. We can’t change what’s already happened. We can learn from it though and use that experience to do better, to make better decisions.
I lost so much time and energy lamenting past choices. It didn’t make me happier beating myself up about them, just the opposite. If you want to be happier, accept your part in what happened, learn and move on.
Sh!t happens
I’m not suggesting that you should feel happy all the time. Not at all. Life throws tough things at us. No one gets through it unscathed, without pain or loss. There are moments, sometimes very dark ones, when happiness isn’t an appropriate response.
It doesn’t help that many of us unwittingly bombard ourselves with even more negativity and sadness. We get consumed watching hours of terrible news broadcasts, we lose ourselves in competitive social media feeds. We make ourselves unhappy.
You might think I’m being overly negative. I’m not. I want you to be happy. I want me to be happy. I want every living being on the planet to be happy (OK, well maybe not spiders and cockroaches. And a couple of politicians).
However – here’s the BUT – you being happy is ultimately down to you. What are you doing to stay happy, or to be happier? Or do you think it will come to you as soon as such-and-such a thing happens?
If you do that you’re just putting off living right now. “As soon as I have that new job everything will be alright”. And maybe it will, for a while. But wouldn’t it be great if everything was alright even without the new job?
In the more difficult chapters of my life, it’s been the good habits I’ve consistently maintained that have helped me return to a place where I feel happy. For me, that’s been yoga, gratitude, exercise and mindset.
And of course, recognising that wherever I was, I put myself there.
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