Are you happy?
It seems like a simple question, but a lot goes into it. Do you mean do I feel happy at the present moment? Or am I happy with the way my life is going in the long term? I think of happiness as an overall positive attitude which results from feeling grateful, satisfied, worthwhile, loved, challenged, driven, and inspired-- which means every aspect of your life plays a role in whether or not you are happy. And the more you consider the concept, the more elusive the feeling can seem. For instance, it is hard to feel both driven and satisfied. To be driven is to have a goal you're working toward, to want something you do not yet have. And to be satisfied is to be content with the way things are going; you feel good about what you already have. Happiness seems to require a great deal of balance, optimism, and effort.
This month I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. In this book, Rubin documents a year in which she focused on actively making herself happier. Each month she picked one aspect of her life to focus on; such aspects included energy, marriage, work, money, and mindfulness. Then she set specific resolutions relating to each area. On the subject of energy, for instance, her resolutions were to get to sleep earlier; exercise better; toss, restore, and organize (with regard to her cluttered material possessions); tackle a nagging task, and act more energetic. All of these things are fairly commonsense; I think most people would agree that better exercise would give them more energy and make them feel happier. And that's kind of how the book goes. Most of the ideas in it are not new or surprising. However, the book still manages to be impressive in that it has gathered all of these ideas in one place and then provided a living example of someone attempting to put them to work in her own life.
Because Rubin's personal Happiness Project affected me, made me evaluate my own life, I have included, beginning in the following paragraph, a collection of the book's ideas and concepts I found most useful. Perhaps you may find them useful as well. Rubin did a ton of research for her book, so while some of the ideas are hers, many of them she is simply passing on. That is what I, too, am doing. Much of what is written below comes straight from her book, and some of it consists of my own elaborations. I hope you find these ideas and reminders to be helpful in better enjoying and getting more out of your day-to-day life.
- "If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough."
- Meaning: You need to challenge yourself, strive for new and greater things. If you never fail, then you must not be taking many risks, and if you take no risks, you're not really living, are you? You are complacent. You're existing. You're merely getting by. And then time passes and you'll have nothing to show for it. When you take risks and challenge yourself, life is slower, more interesting, and memorable.
- Stay on top of simple things: keep things clean and organized. If a task takes five minutes or less, don't put it off. Just get it done. For big tasks, just do a little bit each day and they become much more manageable. If you do these things, many of the little nagging annoyances at the back of your brain go away. Your self-esteem rises because you're being productive and you feel in control of your life.
- Exercise frequently. Eat less at night. You'll feel better and look better. There is such a thing as a natural high. It has all the positives of a substance-related high with none of the drawbacks.
- Behavior and attitude have a reciprocal influence.
- Meaning: Each one influences the other. Most people recognize that if we feel happy, we will act happy. But the opposite is also true. Our attitudes and feelings will also change to match our behaviors. If you act happy, you start feeling happy. The same is true for other emotions. If you act negative (by being sarcastic and cynical, by complaining, etc.), you start to feel more negative inside.
When someone has a problem, they tend to dwell and focus on it, some despairingly and others in a proactive way. However, focusing on a problem can often make it worse. If you focus on the fact that you feel angry, you end up finding more things to be angry about. So while you shouldn't bottle up or ignore your problems entirely, self-distraction is actually a powerful method for lessening their severity and preventing them from ruining all the good things you've got or could have going on.
- Never expect praise or appreciation. Do things because they make YOU feel good or right. If someone else notices, that's a bonus. But you if you make your happiness dependent upon something you can't control like what others say about you, you will often be let down.
- Don't ever dump your negative feelings all on one person. Yes, it's important to share with people, to get release, to bond and feel like you're not alone. But too much negativity will bring anyone down, and if you are its source, the person you're unloading on will like you less. Avoid complaining in general. If it is an important topic, frame the negativity as a discussion rather than a complaint. And if it's not important, learn to just let it go.
- Show the people you love that you love them. Everyone else is just as insecure as you are so it is always good for them to hear you acknowledge their value to you. Give small gifts, do favors, give compliments, make grand gestures, go out of your way. I sometimes find myself wishing someone would do this or that for me, just show up and surprise me in some awesome way. But when this doesn't happen, I figure I can at least do that same thing for someone else. And it has been proven that people often feel happiest when helping others. E.g. Even better than the feeling of laughing is the feeling of having succeeded at making someone else laugh.
- Goal attainment does not make us as happy as we think it will. It does make us happy, but soon enough that happiness wears off, and we find new goals. Striving toward the goals, the process of getting there, makes us at least as happy, and that happiness lasts longer because the effort is drawn out over time. In a word, growth is a major contributor to happiness. Someone who is at the top of their game in one sport might actually have more fun playing something at which they are of average ability because there is room for growth. We feel good when we are improving ourselves.
- Ask for help, and not just from anybody. Ask people who know the topic in question. Most people will enthusiastically help if they think they have something valuable to offer. They'll feel good because they are proving themselves useful. You'll feel good because you're forming a social bond and learning to succeed at something that was difficult for you.
- Make sure your career is something you enjoy because you are going to spend an awful lot of your time doing it. If you enjoy it, it can be a source of happiness rather than a burden combating your happiness. Many people, I think, allow themselves to be trapped in jobs they hate because they need the money or the economy is bad, or the job is easy, or they need more education for the job they really want. But no matter your circumstances, we live in a world that is becoming more and more globally integrated, which means there is an ever-increasing variety of opportunity and choice. Make the extra effort to figure out what you want to do, and have the courage to pursue it. Next to sleep, we spend more time working than doing anything else. It makes no sense for something that's such a big part of our lives to be miserable.
- A lack of feeling bad is not enough to make you happy. You must strive to find sources of feeling good. This is true for two reasons. The first is that life inevitably introduces problems and obstacles. They will always be around, so you need to find positive things to balance them out. Secondly, even if you do manage to remove all sources of bad feeling, that just leaves you with an absence of feeling, a numbness, which in some ways is worse. You don't even feel alive because you don't feel anything. No, you must strive toward positive sources of feeling.
- "When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis
- You miss out on a lot of good if you take yourself too seriously.
- You can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want. Never be afraid to try something out. But there just isn't enough time to do everything and some things just weren't meant for you. Even if many other people find an activity valuable and satisfying, it won't make you happy if you don't find it valuable and satisfying. Examples:
- Things that contribute to my happiness that many people don't enjoy: singing, reading, writing, playing with kids, competition, church.
- Things many people seem to enjoy and that I've tried to enjoy, but they just don't leave me satisfied: drinking, being a "player," watching sports.
- Connection makes us happy. Every positive relationship contributes. And if a lot of the people we're friends with are also friends with each other, i.e. when we have an interconnected social network, this contributes to happiness as well. When this network is in place, each time you influence someone becomes that much more powerful because that influence may also affect several other people you know.
- Being a happy, optimistic, and cheerful person is not the "cool" thing to do. People who act this way are often considered goofy and weird. But who cares, if you're enjoying life more? Plus, research shows that simply being around happy people makes other people happier. Being around a negative person is tiring and unpleasant no matter how cool, worldly, or intelligent they appear to be.
- Some people think, "How can I be happy with so much pain and suffering in the world? Isn't that selfish?"
- True, we should not be blind, deaf, or ignorant to the problems of the world. We should acknowledge them, learn from them, and do something about them if possible. However, there are many issues that are out of our direct control. If you don't think you can do anything about a particular problem and you don't plan to try, then what is the point of allowing it to bring you down? You worrying or ranting or crying or fearing is not helping anyone, and it's making your life less pleasant. So why bother? The time wasted being upset over something you can't control would be better used contributing positively to some area of life that you can control. Doing something useful makes you feel worthwhile and therefore happier, and when you feel happy you have more drive, more energy, to continue reaching out and engaging the world in positive ways. So in a way, both you and the world are better off if you have fewer worries.
- The flip side of this is that if you have no worries it is easy to become complacent/self-satisfied and not reach out to the world at all. The trick, as with many things, is to find a balance. In this case it is a balance between knowing/caring about the world's issues and not letting them become personal issues.
- If you find yourself creatively blocked-off, try simply assigning yourself a production goal and forcing yourself to meet it without worrying about the outcome. Give yourself permission to focus on quantity instead of quality for a little bit. Write 1,000 words a day. Write a poem a day. Make a painting each day. Come up with one idea every hour for an event to host. You will at least get the creative juices flowing, and who knows? Some of what you create might actually be good.
- Money is a means, not an end. Money on its own, sitting in a bank account, will not make you happy, no matter how much there is. But money well-used can lead to happiness if you are spending it on doing things that make you and others happy. If you are using the money, then yes money can buy you some happiness because you are more able and you have more resources to more easily do the things that you love. The only downside is that too much money can make things too easy, and you no longer value them as much because you aren't putting forth that effort toward growth. There is no time to savor the process of improvement if you are able to jump right to the end.
-Money is also relative. A person who makes $40,000 but feels that they really only need $20,000 to survive comfortably is going to be happier than a person who makes $80,000 but feels that they ought to be making $100,000 based on their skills and experience. The first person makes less but feels like they're in a situation of abundance. The second person makes more but feels under-appreciated.
-A large part of happiness is in how we perceive our circumstances. We really can't be happy unless we think we are happy. So while external happenings do have a heavy influence on our attitude, our perceptions and ways of framing those events have just as much influence. Remember Descartes's philosophy, "I think, therefore I am?" He was talking about proofs of existence, but I think it applies to attitude. This is why psychological illness is so difficult to treat. If you think everyone is out to get you, then for you, your reality consists of a world in which everyone is actually out to get you. The fact that this is completely illogical makes not one bit of difference on how you feel. Conversely, if you think you enjoyed and got a lot out of a given situation, then you did enjoy and get a lot out of it. This aspect of attitude is what makes it so frustratingly difficult to change another person's opinion-- we each determine our own "truth." Thankfully, this concept does make it fairly simple to change our own attitudes around if we have the determination to do so.
- We've each developed certain shortcuts to decision-making, certain psychological maxims that we use every day to help us determine what to do, what has value for us, and with whom to interact. Psychologists call these heuristics. The writer Gretchen Rubin calls them "True Rules." I've always thought of mine (the positive ones anyway) as The Philosophy of Zach. Most of the time these ways of thinking are helpful in identifying our core values and in making day-to-day decisions based on those values. But sometimes these heuristics can be misleading, inaccurate, or harmful (Example: prejudice). It is important to be able to recognize and root out the harmful ones, and allow the useful ones to flourish within your life.
-Examples of a few harmful heuristics I caught myself operating under this past year:
People in Kentucky are uneducated.
Alcohol will make me feel better.
Most people are boring.
These ways of thinking led me to some troubles. The second one in particular made me do some dumb things which I regretted. The first and third made me fail to do things I would have likes to do i.e. reaching out and interacting more with strangers/new people.
-Examples of the positive heuristics I live by, or The Philosophy of Zach:
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The difficult thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same.
Love is never wasted.
Good things take time. Great things happen all at once.
Variety is the spice of life.
Yesterday is over.
The future does not exist.
Be good to yourself.
Love your neighbor.
Thank God.
Most of these, by the way, have existed much longer than I have so the name Philosophy of Zach in no way implies ownership of ideas. It simply helps me relate these ideas more directly to my own identity, which then helps me better put them into practice.
- In short, a person who is both self-aware and willing to adjust has a very good chance at becoming happier, because they can understand and admit to both their virtues and their faults. They can have the courage to improve on their skills and work around or eliminate entirely the faults.
I hope these concepts spark an interest in you. If you you're happy now, may you get happier. If you're miserable, may you find the courage and inspiration to change. Just remember that happiness is not an independent quality. It is an overall feeling that result from your own lifestyle choices, experiences, and perceptions. You will not get happier by accident, by simply wanting to be happy. You have to make sure that the major elements of your life match up with your internal values and attitudes. You need to take steps to ensure that the person you are and the person you wish to be are the same person.
Thank you to Gretchen Rubin and her book The Happiness Project for inspiring and providing much of the content of this post. If you have an interest in learning more about her work on this topic, visit her blog at www.happiness-project.com. If you want to try and start your own happiness project, which when you get down to it is simply a conscious and specific effort to improve your quality of life, check out www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com.
It seems like a simple question, but a lot goes into it. Do you mean do I feel happy at the present moment? Or am I happy with the way my life is going in the long term? I think of happiness as an overall positive attitude which results from feeling grateful, satisfied, worthwhile, loved, challenged, driven, and inspired-- which means every aspect of your life plays a role in whether or not you are happy. And the more you consider the concept, the more elusive the feeling can seem. For instance, it is hard to feel both driven and satisfied. To be driven is to have a goal you're working toward, to want something you do not yet have. And to be satisfied is to be content with the way things are going; you feel good about what you already have. Happiness seems to require a great deal of balance, optimism, and effort.
This month I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. In this book, Rubin documents a year in which she focused on actively making herself happier. Each month she picked one aspect of her life to focus on; such aspects included energy, marriage, work, money, and mindfulness. Then she set specific resolutions relating to each area. On the subject of energy, for instance, her resolutions were to get to sleep earlier; exercise better; toss, restore, and organize (with regard to her cluttered material possessions); tackle a nagging task, and act more energetic. All of these things are fairly commonsense; I think most people would agree that better exercise would give them more energy and make them feel happier. And that's kind of how the book goes. Most of the ideas in it are not new or surprising. However, the book still manages to be impressive in that it has gathered all of these ideas in one place and then provided a living example of someone attempting to put them to work in her own life.
Because Rubin's personal Happiness Project affected me, made me evaluate my own life, I have included, beginning in the following paragraph, a collection of the book's ideas and concepts I found most useful. Perhaps you may find them useful as well. Rubin did a ton of research for her book, so while some of the ideas are hers, many of them she is simply passing on. That is what I, too, am doing. Much of what is written below comes straight from her book, and some of it consists of my own elaborations. I hope you find these ideas and reminders to be helpful in better enjoying and getting more out of your day-to-day life.
- "If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough."
- Meaning: You need to challenge yourself, strive for new and greater things. If you never fail, then you must not be taking many risks, and if you take no risks, you're not really living, are you? You are complacent. You're existing. You're merely getting by. And then time passes and you'll have nothing to show for it. When you take risks and challenge yourself, life is slower, more interesting, and memorable.
- Stay on top of simple things: keep things clean and organized. If a task takes five minutes or less, don't put it off. Just get it done. For big tasks, just do a little bit each day and they become much more manageable. If you do these things, many of the little nagging annoyances at the back of your brain go away. Your self-esteem rises because you're being productive and you feel in control of your life.
- Exercise frequently. Eat less at night. You'll feel better and look better. There is such a thing as a natural high. It has all the positives of a substance-related high with none of the drawbacks.
- Behavior and attitude have a reciprocal influence.
- Meaning: Each one influences the other. Most people recognize that if we feel happy, we will act happy. But the opposite is also true. Our attitudes and feelings will also change to match our behaviors. If you act happy, you start feeling happy. The same is true for other emotions. If you act negative (by being sarcastic and cynical, by complaining, etc.), you start to feel more negative inside.
When someone has a problem, they tend to dwell and focus on it, some despairingly and others in a proactive way. However, focusing on a problem can often make it worse. If you focus on the fact that you feel angry, you end up finding more things to be angry about. So while you shouldn't bottle up or ignore your problems entirely, self-distraction is actually a powerful method for lessening their severity and preventing them from ruining all the good things you've got or could have going on.
- Never expect praise or appreciation. Do things because they make YOU feel good or right. If someone else notices, that's a bonus. But you if you make your happiness dependent upon something you can't control like what others say about you, you will often be let down.
- Don't ever dump your negative feelings all on one person. Yes, it's important to share with people, to get release, to bond and feel like you're not alone. But too much negativity will bring anyone down, and if you are its source, the person you're unloading on will like you less. Avoid complaining in general. If it is an important topic, frame the negativity as a discussion rather than a complaint. And if it's not important, learn to just let it go.
- Show the people you love that you love them. Everyone else is just as insecure as you are so it is always good for them to hear you acknowledge their value to you. Give small gifts, do favors, give compliments, make grand gestures, go out of your way. I sometimes find myself wishing someone would do this or that for me, just show up and surprise me in some awesome way. But when this doesn't happen, I figure I can at least do that same thing for someone else. And it has been proven that people often feel happiest when helping others. E.g. Even better than the feeling of laughing is the feeling of having succeeded at making someone else laugh.
- Goal attainment does not make us as happy as we think it will. It does make us happy, but soon enough that happiness wears off, and we find new goals. Striving toward the goals, the process of getting there, makes us at least as happy, and that happiness lasts longer because the effort is drawn out over time. In a word, growth is a major contributor to happiness. Someone who is at the top of their game in one sport might actually have more fun playing something at which they are of average ability because there is room for growth. We feel good when we are improving ourselves.
- Ask for help, and not just from anybody. Ask people who know the topic in question. Most people will enthusiastically help if they think they have something valuable to offer. They'll feel good because they are proving themselves useful. You'll feel good because you're forming a social bond and learning to succeed at something that was difficult for you.
- Make sure your career is something you enjoy because you are going to spend an awful lot of your time doing it. If you enjoy it, it can be a source of happiness rather than a burden combating your happiness. Many people, I think, allow themselves to be trapped in jobs they hate because they need the money or the economy is bad, or the job is easy, or they need more education for the job they really want. But no matter your circumstances, we live in a world that is becoming more and more globally integrated, which means there is an ever-increasing variety of opportunity and choice. Make the extra effort to figure out what you want to do, and have the courage to pursue it. Next to sleep, we spend more time working than doing anything else. It makes no sense for something that's such a big part of our lives to be miserable.
- A lack of feeling bad is not enough to make you happy. You must strive to find sources of feeling good. This is true for two reasons. The first is that life inevitably introduces problems and obstacles. They will always be around, so you need to find positive things to balance them out. Secondly, even if you do manage to remove all sources of bad feeling, that just leaves you with an absence of feeling, a numbness, which in some ways is worse. You don't even feel alive because you don't feel anything. No, you must strive toward positive sources of feeling.
- "When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis
- You miss out on a lot of good if you take yourself too seriously.
- You can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want. Never be afraid to try something out. But there just isn't enough time to do everything and some things just weren't meant for you. Even if many other people find an activity valuable and satisfying, it won't make you happy if you don't find it valuable and satisfying. Examples:
- Things that contribute to my happiness that many people don't enjoy: singing, reading, writing, playing with kids, competition, church.
- Things many people seem to enjoy and that I've tried to enjoy, but they just don't leave me satisfied: drinking, being a "player," watching sports.
- Connection makes us happy. Every positive relationship contributes. And if a lot of the people we're friends with are also friends with each other, i.e. when we have an interconnected social network, this contributes to happiness as well. When this network is in place, each time you influence someone becomes that much more powerful because that influence may also affect several other people you know.
- Being a happy, optimistic, and cheerful person is not the "cool" thing to do. People who act this way are often considered goofy and weird. But who cares, if you're enjoying life more? Plus, research shows that simply being around happy people makes other people happier. Being around a negative person is tiring and unpleasant no matter how cool, worldly, or intelligent they appear to be.
- Some people think, "How can I be happy with so much pain and suffering in the world? Isn't that selfish?"
- True, we should not be blind, deaf, or ignorant to the problems of the world. We should acknowledge them, learn from them, and do something about them if possible. However, there are many issues that are out of our direct control. If you don't think you can do anything about a particular problem and you don't plan to try, then what is the point of allowing it to bring you down? You worrying or ranting or crying or fearing is not helping anyone, and it's making your life less pleasant. So why bother? The time wasted being upset over something you can't control would be better used contributing positively to some area of life that you can control. Doing something useful makes you feel worthwhile and therefore happier, and when you feel happy you have more drive, more energy, to continue reaching out and engaging the world in positive ways. So in a way, both you and the world are better off if you have fewer worries.
- The flip side of this is that if you have no worries it is easy to become complacent/self-satisfied and not reach out to the world at all. The trick, as with many things, is to find a balance. In this case it is a balance between knowing/caring about the world's issues and not letting them become personal issues.
- If you find yourself creatively blocked-off, try simply assigning yourself a production goal and forcing yourself to meet it without worrying about the outcome. Give yourself permission to focus on quantity instead of quality for a little bit. Write 1,000 words a day. Write a poem a day. Make a painting each day. Come up with one idea every hour for an event to host. You will at least get the creative juices flowing, and who knows? Some of what you create might actually be good.
- Money is a means, not an end. Money on its own, sitting in a bank account, will not make you happy, no matter how much there is. But money well-used can lead to happiness if you are spending it on doing things that make you and others happy. If you are using the money, then yes money can buy you some happiness because you are more able and you have more resources to more easily do the things that you love. The only downside is that too much money can make things too easy, and you no longer value them as much because you aren't putting forth that effort toward growth. There is no time to savor the process of improvement if you are able to jump right to the end.
-Money is also relative. A person who makes $40,000 but feels that they really only need $20,000 to survive comfortably is going to be happier than a person who makes $80,000 but feels that they ought to be making $100,000 based on their skills and experience. The first person makes less but feels like they're in a situation of abundance. The second person makes more but feels under-appreciated.
-A large part of happiness is in how we perceive our circumstances. We really can't be happy unless we think we are happy. So while external happenings do have a heavy influence on our attitude, our perceptions and ways of framing those events have just as much influence. Remember Descartes's philosophy, "I think, therefore I am?" He was talking about proofs of existence, but I think it applies to attitude. This is why psychological illness is so difficult to treat. If you think everyone is out to get you, then for you, your reality consists of a world in which everyone is actually out to get you. The fact that this is completely illogical makes not one bit of difference on how you feel. Conversely, if you think you enjoyed and got a lot out of a given situation, then you did enjoy and get a lot out of it. This aspect of attitude is what makes it so frustratingly difficult to change another person's opinion-- we each determine our own "truth." Thankfully, this concept does make it fairly simple to change our own attitudes around if we have the determination to do so.
- We've each developed certain shortcuts to decision-making, certain psychological maxims that we use every day to help us determine what to do, what has value for us, and with whom to interact. Psychologists call these heuristics. The writer Gretchen Rubin calls them "True Rules." I've always thought of mine (the positive ones anyway) as The Philosophy of Zach. Most of the time these ways of thinking are helpful in identifying our core values and in making day-to-day decisions based on those values. But sometimes these heuristics can be misleading, inaccurate, or harmful (Example: prejudice). It is important to be able to recognize and root out the harmful ones, and allow the useful ones to flourish within your life.
-Examples of a few harmful heuristics I caught myself operating under this past year:
People in Kentucky are uneducated.
Alcohol will make me feel better.
Most people are boring.
These ways of thinking led me to some troubles. The second one in particular made me do some dumb things which I regretted. The first and third made me fail to do things I would have likes to do i.e. reaching out and interacting more with strangers/new people.
-Examples of the positive heuristics I live by, or The Philosophy of Zach:
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The difficult thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same.
Love is never wasted.
Good things take time. Great things happen all at once.
Variety is the spice of life.
Yesterday is over.
The future does not exist.
Be good to yourself.
Love your neighbor.
Thank God.
Most of these, by the way, have existed much longer than I have so the name Philosophy of Zach in no way implies ownership of ideas. It simply helps me relate these ideas more directly to my own identity, which then helps me better put them into practice.
- In short, a person who is both self-aware and willing to adjust has a very good chance at becoming happier, because they can understand and admit to both their virtues and their faults. They can have the courage to improve on their skills and work around or eliminate entirely the faults.
I hope these concepts spark an interest in you. If you you're happy now, may you get happier. If you're miserable, may you find the courage and inspiration to change. Just remember that happiness is not an independent quality. It is an overall feeling that result from your own lifestyle choices, experiences, and perceptions. You will not get happier by accident, by simply wanting to be happy. You have to make sure that the major elements of your life match up with your internal values and attitudes. You need to take steps to ensure that the person you are and the person you wish to be are the same person.
Thank you to Gretchen Rubin and her book The Happiness Project for inspiring and providing much of the content of this post. If you have an interest in learning more about her work on this topic, visit her blog at www.happiness-project.com. If you want to try and start your own happiness project, which when you get down to it is simply a conscious and specific effort to improve your quality of life, check out www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com.
