Have you ever met anyone who did not want happiness? Certainly, I haven’t. I have met people who have funny ways of going about trying to be happy but never anyone who was just not interested in it.
The funny is though, that wanting happiness and having it are two different things. In the first place, we don’t always know what will make us happy. Even when we work it out, we can’t always make it happen—we might long for someone to love but are not able to find the right person. The irony is that even when we do get what we are looking for, it does not always make us feel as good as we expected.
Happiness is tricky—partly because we have some funny ideas about it. Let’s look at four of these.
We confuse happiness with pleasure
In evolutionary terms, pleasure acts as an incentive for keeping us alive. So, food, sex, caring for our children, and accomplishing our goals cause the brain to release the chemical dopamine that make us feel happy. This search for good feeling has helped to keep the human race going, but these feelings were designed to be temporary. Think about it—if we only mated once and never needed to again, we would see a startling fall in the birth rate. Pleasure is something that is so enjoyable that we want to experience it again and again. However, it is designed as a temporary state with a specific purpose, rather than something that will last forever.
Sadly, we often seem to find this hard to accept. Our search for happiness can become narrowed down to the pursuit of pleasure. Once we have it, we to hold on to it– or at least try to repeat it as often as we can.
The trouble is that we so often mistake transient pleasurable experiences for lasting happiness. We have evolved to a place where our happiness is not based on survival alone. Yet so often we settle for the quick fix, pleasure-based route to happiness, without taking into account the full range of potential effects.
Perhaps we feel a bit low, so we surf the internet for a bit, then drink a coffee and checkout the news channels on TV. We could take some time to look into the low feeling in order to understand and resolve it. However, our impulse is to distract ourselves from it and not deal with it. It’s as if we are aiming to run our life as a series of good moments, with as few bad ones as possible to interfere with our final score.
We imagine it will last forever
So, we can see that from an evolutionary perspective, happiness is designed as a reward for keeping ourselves alive. It is not meant to last forever. In our modern western culture though, there is the idea that we should be happy all the time. We make choices based on the belief that they will make us happy now and into the future. The idea that our preferences or circumstances may change doesn’t seem to come up. We don’t consider that our future selves may see things differently from how we do now.
Anyone who has been divorced, or had a great new job turn out to be disappointing will have experienced this for themselves. When I was a young teacher in London, I decided to cash in my teacher’s pension so I could go traveling. It felt like a great decision at the time. Suddenly I had a good reserve of money to finance one of my dreams. Years later, when I left teaching, I deeply regretted not having a pension fund to carry forward.
On a lighter note, I have a Danish friend who became a Buddhist nun some years ago.Whenever it’s too hot to wear socks I have the treat of seeing a tall, slender woman in long,maroon robes with a tattoo of an iguana coiling up her left ankle. The frisky young womanwho, some years back, thought this tattoo would be an addition to her image, apparentlydid not envisage the possibility of herself as a nun in the future.
We think money will make us happy
2006 saw the publication of Richard Layard’s book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. One of the key findings that he highlightedis that over the last fifty years, the standard ofliving in the US and Western Europe has roughly doubled. No surprises there, you might think. The shock came with the second half of the finding—levels of happiness have stayed the same. Think of what it takes to double our standard of living – the compromises in work–life balance, the increase in the number of families where the only way to manage is for both parents to work, the stress of the increase in pace and variety of the modern workplace. It’s shocking to find that none of that has an impact on our basic level of well being.
The way we adapt to what we have and the extent to which we compare what we have with others comes into play here.
One of the most startling results to emerge from research into happiness is that big lottery winners, after experiencing an initial period of euphoria, tend to return to their normal levels of happiness within a year. The huge rise in their financial and then material resources is not enough to lift their happiness levels long term.
The trouble is that we adapt to what we have and so become used to it, and when the gloss of having it fades, we want something more.
The process of adaptation we experience with material possessions seems to work in the sameway for life experiences – so career moves, lifestyle changes or new relationships, ratherthan transporting us to new levels of happiness, eventually settle down until they become simply part of our normal pattern of happiness.
Along with adapting to what we have in life, we also suffer from comparing our lives with other people’s. So, your new car may be satisfying while no one else in the street has a better one, but as soon as someone turns up with a newer model then you become less satisfied. We’re pleased with our pay rise as long as we’re the only person to receive one, or if our rise is greater than anyone else’s.
We compare ourselves with our peers, people with roughly similar lifestyles. The lives of the super-rich are far beyond our reach, while many people feel comfortably far away from the very poor. Studies of Olympic medallists show that bronze medalists tend to be happier with their medals than silver medallists because they compare them- selves to people who did not get a medal at all, while silver medallists believe they just missed a gold.
We look for happiness outside of ourselves
We’ve seen that pleasure is based on external circumstances, such as our job, where we live, or what we like to eat. Although the benefits are short- term we can often mistake this for happiness, overlooking the possibility of something more reliable. A more helpful view is to say that there are two kinds of happiness: the short-term, pleasure-based experience and a more lasting happiness. The first kind is much easier to attain than the deeper happiness,which requires effort but once established serves as a reliable basis for wellbeing.
Giving ourselves the time and space to explore and develop this lasting happiness is oneof the deepest acts of self-compassion we can engage in.
So, how do we access this deeper kind of happiness? Firstly, we need to recognize that it isnot about looking outwards but depends on having an inner peace of mind and heart. Thisis the basis for self-awareness and the awareness of others – the foundation of compassion– that enables us to view our actions and those of other people with greater clarity. It canbe developed by working with both our basic attitude and with the actions we take whiletrying to be happy.
Meditation is the best way to get a handle on how our minds work. It helps us to work with our basic attitude and the habits we have. Bringing awareness into our actions means that we are more able to make the right decisions.
A deeper meaning to happiness
Sometimes, it’s worth asking ourselves how we value the happiness of other people. Is their happiness important to us? Would our happiness be important to them? Do we consider out happiness to be the most important? On what basis?
There is a simple question we can use here as a measure of whether or not our actions will be a source of lasting happiness:
Do they bring real benefit to oneself and others,or not?
Actions that bring benefit automatically result in happiness and help us to develop our compassion. We need to develop a clear sense of discernment to enable us to analyse our actions clearly in the light of this question, and to identify the habits that lead us away from lasting happiness even if they initially seem to bring pleasure.
It might seem a lot to take in but reflecting in this way will help us to navigate the tricky path of happiness. It could help to put things into a different perspective.
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
Last week was quite a rough week in which gratitude did not readily leap into my mind. A close family member was admitted to hospital early in the week. Our car developed an ominous rattle, which turned out to signal the need for massive repairs. Various work deadlines had to be pushed back. There was plenty of worry and stress.
On Sunday evening we were due to go over to a friend’s place for dinner. We really wanted to see him but were struggling to pull our energy together and make the journey across town by public transport. My partner rang him to finalise travel instructions and our friend picked up on our exhausted state. He immediately suggested that he bring the food over to us and cook the meal for us right in our own home!
Suddenly gratitude was a much bigger part of my world view.
Gratitude can increase your happiness
The relationship between happiness and gratitude is one that is being thoroughly researched in the field of Positive Psychology. There is now quite a considerable body of studies and findings that show the benefits of gratitude.
In her book, The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky details research her department of psychology in the University of California has carried out on the power of gratitude. Subjects are required to keep a ‘gratitude’ journal every Sunday for six weeks in which they record five things that they could feel grateful for during the previous week. Their levels of happiness and well-being were found to have increased as a result.
The importance of noticing things you are grateful for
If I am honest, I used to find that my eyes would glaze over as I read the huge lists of ways your life can improve once you make room for gratitude. It’s probably because of my upbringing and the emphasis on always saying ‘thank you’ and having to write an endless stream of thank you letters to aunts and uncles every birthday and Christmas. I got into the way of feeling gratitude was a bit of a chore – something I was ‘supposed’ to feel.
It’s really through my meditation practice that I have found the space to allow gratitude to flourish. It’s something to do with my mind quietening down sufficiently to allow me to experience more directly. Then I can notice what I want to be grateful for. The more I allow myself to open to it, the more settled I feel, and my happiness is increased. Last week was not a very happy week and yet our friend’s kindness resulted in us both going to bed more relaxed and happier than we had been all week.
365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life
I particularly recommend this short, readable book for its no-nonsense, practical approach to gratitude. The author John Kralik tells the story of how he turned his life around by focusing his attention on what he had of value in his life rather than on what was missing.
In Kralik’s case that was no hypothetical shift. He was a middle-aged and overweight divorcé. He was estranged from his older children, on the point of losing his current girlfriend and possibly his business too. He felt things had come to such a point that he needed to make major changes in his life.
Inspired by a thank-you note that he received himself he decided to spend the year writing at least one thank you letter a day to cover all the things in his life he could feel grateful for. The book tells the story of how this process did in fact change his life.
The gratitude story in Kralik’s book that stood out most for me
My favourite story concerns Scott, the guy who serves the author in his local Starbucks. Not only does Scott remember how Kralik likes his coffee but he greets him every day by name in a genuine and friendly way. When Kralik delivers his thank you note, Scott assumes it is a complaint letter and is momentarily dismayed only to be delighted on realizing his has received appreciation and gratitude instead.
Gratitude can help us to really see people
It made me more aware of how I interact with the ‘routine’ people in my life—cab drivers, waitresses, shop assistants—all the people it can be so easy to glaze over while my attention is focused elsewhere. Just because someone is paid to do a job or offer a service it does not mean that we no longer need to feel appreciated for what we do. Like Kralik, I also quickly saw how much better I feel in taking the time to properly acknowledge the services I receive.
A thought about gratitude in the workplace
At work it is all too easy to take our colleagues for granted, or to feel unappreciated ourselves. Lyubomirsky points out that, among other things, gratitude helps us appreciate what we have rather than yearn for what we do not have and so increases our sense of self-worth and self-esteem. When we see how much we have to be grateful for it increases our confidence and helps us to unlearn the habit of over-focusing on our weaknesses and failures. So, a work team that is able to share appreciation for each other’s work and gratitude for each individual’s contribution has to be a healthier, stronger and more effective operating force. Take a look at Kralik’s book if you need convincing.
Some ways to cultivate gratitude
1. Keep your own gratitude journal
You could try keeping your own gratitude journal. This does not need to be anything fancy. A simple notebook that you use to jot down things that happened to you during the day which inspired gratitude. It helps us to notice things we are grateful for and to remember them.
2. Start a gratitude ritual
I have some friends who have a family ritual. Over dinner at the weekend each member of the family gets to share something that happened to them during the week that they are grateful for. They say it really brings the family together and everyone enjoys hearing the other people’s stories.
3. Try writing your own thank you notes
Of course, you could always try your own version of John Kralik’s thank you letters.
As I write this post ……
I am working on a tight schedule today and my partner just offered to cover my share of the morning chores so I could get started. It’s quite amazing how such a simple gesture can help me to settle so much more deeply. Feeling gratitude certainly can lead to a greater feeling of contentment. We just need to be open to noticing it and letting it nourish us.
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
A few years ago, I had to attend an outpatient clinic in one of Amsterdam’s big teaching hospitals. My treatment lasted several weeks and involved me making frequent trips. Naturally enough, after a while I began to see other people making the same journey. Something that struck me very strongly was that the was a big variety of people all going through a similar experience—different ages, backgrounds, ethnicity, occupation were just a few. Yet all them had an important element in common—the wish to be well and a feeling of vulnerability because they were not sure how their treatment was going to turn out. On top of that, most people came with a friend, or partner, or relative and the love and care between them was palpable—the carers so wanted everything to work out well for the people they were caring for.
As human beings, we all want to be happy and not to have to deal with pain and suffering and yet, pain and suffering are an inevitable part of life. My hospital experience demonstrated that for me profoundly but it also showed me the tenderness and courage that underlies that truth. As just one patient going through the motions of treatment, along with all these people who started out as strangers to me, I felt the raw material of myself as a human being. Maybe my interests, and life experiences were different but that was of no consequence. My hopes and fears were pretty much the same as everyone else’s who were there with me. There was a shared appreciation that while we were all going through our individual treatment, we were in this together. Somewhere each of us was touched by the depth of interconnectedness that unites us in common humanity.
A way to look at self-compassion
In her book, Self-Compassion, Kristen Neff describes what she calls the three elements of self-compassion. These are self–kindness as an antidote to self-judgment; common humanity as an antidote to isolation and mindfulness as an antidote to over-identification. My blog, How to be a Good Friend to Yourself, discusses the first element and I will cover the third element in my next blog. Let’s look now at our tendency for self-isolation.
Why do we tend to hide away when we feel bad?
Think of times when you behave in a way that you are not happy with—you lose your temper, or you’re impatient with a waiter in a restaurant. Do you feel yourself shrink a little? There’s a sense of disappointment and perhaps some shame. What about when you find yourself skipping the gym for the third week running, or not ringing your friend who just broke up with their partner because you don’t have the energy to comfort them again? Then there are the tricks that life can play on us—we get made redundant, or our children leave home and we don’t know how to fill the gap. Events like this that make us feel less good about ourselves can lead to us wanting to shut ourselves away from other people. We don’t feel good enough and we are worried that other people will find us inadequate too. Our fear is that if we are not managing to be up to the mark, then other people will not want to be with us, let alone love us. Much better to hide away before we feel rejected.
Self-isolation is contrary to how life it
When we isolate ourselves, we are cutting ourselves off from the nourishment and support of people, who, although we don’t realize it at the time, are just like us. Compassion is about understanding that everyone suffers and that suffering is part of life. When we can open ourselves to the reality of this, we find that we stop shrinking. Instead of being locked into a sense of our own failings we can see them in relation to the failings of others. Did you ever meet a perfect human being? My guess would be no—and yet we continuously expect ourselves to be perfect! There can be a big relief in dropping this pretence and accepting ourselves as a flawed human being, who is doing their best along with everyone else. Self-compassion is relational. It involves understanding that we have disappointments and inadequacies, while finding the courage to address them.
What Mirror Neurons tell us about interconnectedness
Mirror neurons were discovered by Italian researchers in the 1990s. Before this discovery, it was thought that the brain uses logical thought processes to interpret and predict other people’s actions. However, mirror neurons seem to enable us to simulate not only other people’s actions but also the intentions and emotions behind those actions. It’s just like when you see someone cut their finger and you automatically wince in sympathy. It also seems that mirror neurons have a role to play in interpreting facial expressions and hand gestures. They point to a continuous subtle level of communication that is going on between our own brain and the brains of people around us. Vittorio Gallese, MD, PhD, one of the researchers involved in the original research in the University of Palma comments, It seems we’re wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different. At the root, as humans we identify the person we’re facing as someone like ourselves.
This points to a neurological basis for common humanity and appreciating the power of interconnectedness. Knowing the science can help develop our confidence in common humanity but it is opening our hearts to the experience of it that will help us to make it part of our lives.
A simple way to see how interconnected we are
When we wake up in the morning and start our routine we are usually focused on getting ready for our day and all the things we need to do. Tomorrow morning why not try something different—think about how interconnected we all are. As you shower and dress take a moment to check the labels in your clothes. The chances are that many of them come from countries other than the one you are living in. How many people would have been involved in making these clothes and getting them to you? We can start by thinking of the people who made the clothes but to make them they would have needed the raw materials and so there is a whole mass of people involved in all the processes of making the fabrics. Then there is design and marketing and transport and advertising and selling! It’s probably fair to say that there are thousands of people who contributed to the clothes that we are putting on. Through their efforts, they touch our lives.
Life is what happens while we are making other plans
The plans we make
Many of us grew up with some version of how our lives might unfold—versions passed down to us from our parents, and adjusted according to the influences we encountered while growing up. I remember deciding quite early on that I was going to live in an isolated village community at the top of a mountain far from civilisation. My plan was to live only with people that I loved and I certainly intended to have a big family. By the time I was eighteen I was at university in Leeds and on my way to becoming a teacher in London—no mountain top in sight! A few years later I found out that I was not able to have children and no amount of treatment seemed able to turn that around.
The uncertainty of life
We all want to be happy and live a good life. We may well have lots of ideas as to how we want to make this happen but we can see that life is quite fragile and uncertain. Circumstances change, things happen beyond our control and we never know what the next day will bring. We never have enough information to make the decisions that affect our lives—how will the person you promise to love and cherish from today onwards be in twenty years’ time? Will you still like them? We can hope but we cannot be sure.
Our frailty
Then our bodies can let us down at a moment’s notice. The news is full of accidents that befall people going about their ordinary everyday lives—then there are the extraordinary events of terrorist attacks and travel catastrophes. On top of that, there are numerous illnesses and complaints that can invade our bodies and, inevitably, there is the slow but steady onset of ageing.
The insecurities of work
Perhaps we set out in life to be successful at work. In our meritocratic society, we are told from an early age that, with hard work, we can become whatever we want. The problem is that life shows us something different. However much we study and train there are circumstances beyond our control that will affect the result we are looking for. We might have an unsupportive boss; the economy might go into recession; or we may have to move house to be near an ailing parent. We watch in amazement the people who appear to have discovered how to make the system work for them and seem to have endless resources and opportunities.
We can wonder if we can become anything we want what is wrong with us when we are not at the top of our game. If rewards go to the people who deserve them, then are we undeserving?
Happiness and success
We can see that although we may wish for happiness, it is not as easy to bring about as we hoped and unhappiness comes much more often than we want. Perhaps our relationship is in trouble, maybe we cannot afford the holiday we were looking forward to, or we feel lonely even when with our friends. None of this fits with the images of success that fill advertising campaigns, which tend to focus on happy, fit and glamorous people. Social media can help to create an idea that everyone is having more fun than we are in all areas of life—work, leisure, family life, wellbeing and so on. It is a small step from feeling that others are doing better than ourselves to equating their happiness with success and any of our own unhappiness with failure.
How do we respond?
Fear of vulnerability
All of this can leave us feeling vulnerable, which does not need to be a problem except if we see it as a weakness. Many of us feel that if we are vulnerable, then other people will look down on us, or even take advantage of us. My mother used to warn me not to let other people see when I was upset and struggling to cope. She told me that it was a way of ‘letting myself down’. Her advice left me with a sense that being vulnerable diminished me, and made me less effective.
Happiness = success
If we feel vulnerable and are trying to cover it up, then we are easily going to tip over into trying very hard to appear as in control as we possibly can. You are probably familiar with the line of thinking—if I can hold it together, not show my feelings and get things right, then people are going to like me and approve of me. Because we are equating happiness with success, then we want to emulate what is seems to mean to be happy. We push down any feelings of vulnerability and insecurity and strive for an idea of perfection which we think will guarantee us acceptance.
Our critical voice
All of this is taking place with a tremendous amount of effort. We will ourselves to accomplish what we feel we must accomplish to hold our place in our community. We are not sharing our struggle with anyone else, so there is no-one to turn to for advice. This vacuum is filled with our own critical voice urging us to try harder and finding fault every step of the way. It is as if we believe that it is only by beating ourselves up that we will get the best from ourselves. If we let up the continuous critical commentary, we will not be able to trust ourselves to stay focused and accomplish what we feel we have to do.
Does this work?
After I left teaching I was appointed to a small executive team managing a large multi-national non-profit. I loved the work but it was incredibly challenging, with a steep learning curve. For the first time in my career I was one of the people in charge and the demands of the role pushed me back into insecurities that I thought had been overcome. It was not clear to me how much of cover up I was trying to pull off until there was a meeting with the directors of each of our national groups. The executive team was trying to get agreement on a key issue that I had put a lot of work into. The meeting quickly got stuck and it looked as if the project was going to fail. Out of a desperate attempt to save the project, I dropped my guard and spoke from the heart about how important it was.
Imagine my amazement when after the meeting—and its successful outcome—several people approached me to say how much it had meant to them to see me showing some vulnerability. It seems that till that point colleagues had been finding me tough and uncompromising, when I knew how challenged and insecure I felt. My inability to share any of my vulnerability and my attempts to appear in control had led people to feel less at ease with me and to not fully trust my directions.
Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, fallible and imperfect
Vulnerable
We may be afraid that allowing ourselves to be vulnerable will make us appear weak, when in fact, the opposite is true. When we are vulnerable we are not pretending, we are not hiding—we are simply present with whatever is going on inside us. We can relax. This gives a kind of confidence that we can manage whatever is going on. There is also a generosity, because we are allowing others to know what is going on with us and are indicating a willingness to receive help and support from them as we go through it. Such openness is flexible and responsive, rather than brittle and afraid.
Fallible
Engaging with self-compassion is a way of discovering a sense of acceptance of ourselves. We take on engaging with ourselves as we would with a good friend. We treat ourselves with kindness rather than harsh criticism, which helps us to work with our difficulties in a more sustainable way. Connecting with our own fallibility reminds us that everyone struggles at some time or other. At any time we may be feeling bad about something in our lives it is a fairly good bet that many other people are going through something very similar. We are all in the same boat regarding the uncertainties of life.
Imperfect
Have you ever met anyone that you consider perfect? It’s not common, is it? Why then do we think that is a realistic goal for ourselves? My meeting story shows that by trying to be perfect, we face the possibility of being less effective than we want to be. On the other hand, learning to accept ourselves as we are, with all our insecurities, fears and worries can be a deep source of wellbeing. When we can feel comfortable with all aspects of ourselves—the parts we like as well as the parts that we would like to be different—then we have the raw materials of coping with what life brings. With these raw materials the uncertainties of life become more the inevitable flow of life to be worked with, rather than fears and challenges to be battled against.
If you would like to take the ideas in this post further check out my online course How to be a Good Friend to Yourself
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