Is Happiness Fleeting?!

It is said that happiness lasts about fifteen minutes. Sooner or later either some news will arrive to spoil it or a niggling thought will surface to change it. Even when we are happy, we worry about what might take our happiness away. Happiness is not stationary. It is always moving. No matter what we get or achieve, happiness from external events will be short-lived. Successful people who have achieved their goal report immediately focusing on the next one. It is human nature to always be looking for the next big thing. But there is nothing wrong with that. Life would be dull if we had nothing to look forward to, so the question is, how can we change our set point and get happiness to last?

In a classic study conducted by the Southern Methodist University, three groups were given a writing task.

One was asked to spend a few minutes over four days describing their ideal future, another had to describe their plans for the day and the third were asked to relate a traumatic event. The results revealed that the happiest group, even three months later, were those who described intense happiness in the future; they reported longer periods of contentedness during the day. Although talking about trauma felt cathartic at the time, it did not have any longlasting effect on happiness itself. The key with discussing trauma seems to be to release the feelings and replace them with positive thoughts that the trauma is dealt with, that wisdom has been gained through the experience. Simply replaying it in our minds will reproduce the feelings of despair the original event provoked.

Feeling unhappy is more often than not a result of thinking about past unhappiness or imagining a bleak future. When asked what makes them unhappy a group of people replied:

• Remembering loved ones they had lost through death or separation
• Recalling feelings of hope that were dashed
• Remembering a moment of intense shame or defeat
• Worrying about loneliness
• Feeling unloved, unwanted, rejected
• Dissatisfaction with work and relationships

Dwelling on these things causes a drop in serotonin, which affects mood, creating a vicious circle of sadness. Action is needed to reverse mood, and force of will to play an upbeat piece of music for example, when we feel a sad melody would better match our state of mind. Medical conditions that cause depression such as thyroid imbalances may be originally caused by stress, and stress is a result of our perception of our circumstances.

Counting our blessings may seem a twee response to an apparently desperate set of circumstances. Humans have a tendency to focus on the negative however, in a misguided attempt to avoid denial. But we can be aware of an issue without allowing it to alter our perception of life. Whatever problems we face, there are always others who have it even worse; there is always something to feel thankful for.

Homes for the elderly are full of people still fretting, after all these years. Let us not die worrying about the future.

What Is Happiness? A Look From Different Angles

Happiness has different meanings to different people.

To behaviorists, happiness is a combination of emotions that one experiences when he/she does something good or positive.

To neurologists, happiness is the experience that one has when a flood of hormones are released in the brain as a reward for behavior that tends to prolong survival.

According to a number of religions, happiness is an indicator of presence of God.

Although, many specialists have investigated the meaning of happiness, philosophers are the only specialists who have investigated the issue to more detail. After a number of research studies, the philosophers settled down on two basic views of what happiness is. The views are hedonia and eudaimonia.
Of the two, hedonia view is the most famous although the two views find their roots in the ancient Greek philosophy.

The hedonistic view defines happiness as the polar opposite of suffering. According to the view, presence of happiness usually indicates absence of pain. As a result of this, hedonists believe that the sole purpose of life is to maximize happiness which in turn minimizes misery.

Over the years, hedonists have come up with ways to prolong happiness. The unfortunate thing is that most of the ways are all wrong. Some of the wrong ways include: sexuality, use of drugs, alcohol and other things that are a target of societal and religious scorn.

Eudaimonia which is the less famous view defines happiness as the pursuit of being a better person. Eudaimonists pursue to be better people by challenging themselves intellectually or by engaging in activities that tend to make them spiritually richer.

As you would have seen, the difference between the two views is that one of them (hedoism) says that happiness is derived externally, while the other (eudaimonia) says that happiness comes from within.
One would conclude that eudaimonia is the superior view. This is because under the view, acts such as kindness towards others, generosity, and cultivating natural talents are usually honored more than other pursuits that tend to bring about happiness that is associated with hedoism. For example, accumulating of health is usually not prized under eudaimonia.

Although, eudaimonia seems to be a very good view, there is a paradox. For example, for you to be generous to other people, don't you need to accumulate some wealth?

It's almost impossible to tell which is the best view of the two and perhaps the best definition of happiness should be left to an individual.

Searching for Happiness

Because our eyes are primed to notice the negatives, we tend to pick up on, and emphasize, the problems. We generally see past most of the good things in our lives and focus on the few things that aren't. And because we don't like problems, they themselves being a form of pain, we have a natural impulse to try and fix them as soon as we can. This does serve us to a degree but, because we are so focused on the problem, our process of creating solutions has become exactly that - problem-focused.

In this way the problem becomes the center of our attention and confines our thinking to its level. For instance, if we were faced with the problem of darkness, this way of thinking would have us try to solve this problem by trying to fight the darkness - studying it, figuring it out and thinking of ways to overcome it. But the simplest and most effective solution here has very little to do with the problem. For the simplest solution to overcoming darkness is to turn on a light.

Rather than trying to fix the problems that cause unhappiness, what if we focused our attention on creating happiness? The question then is how do we create happiness? With the challenge being that, as with all emotions, happiness cannot be created directly.

I can think of three ways in which we can create happiness for ourselves. The first is by simply doing the things that we love and are passionate about. There is nothing more satisfying than discovering that which ignites you, that which feels like you were born to do, and doing it. Not everyone has discovered what this is for them. But if we could, and if we could direct more of our lives into these areas, we would go a long way in creating lives of happiness and meaning for ourselves. And if we could make a living from these areas, we would never work another day in our lives.

The second way we can create happiness for ourselves is by going beyond our comfort zone. Once we create a comfort zone we rarely step outside of it. This is because of the sense of safety and security we feel within it, with that which is familiar. But after a while of being exposed to the same set of stimuli within our comfort zone, our senses become deadened to them, numbed by their monotony. We find ourselves getting bored, checking out, and trying to find other unhealthy ways to spark our interest and bring a bit of life into our lives. Yet we cling to our comfort zones out of fear of failure, of risk, and of the unknown, causing us to live in the contradiction of thinking big but playing small.

If you think of the last time you felt alive, really alive, I bet you were doing something way outside your comfort zone - putting yourself out there and risking yourself. It is here that we light up because our brain literally does light up with activity at the exposure to a whole new world to be discovered and known. Yes there is more risk here. And yes we don't feel safe here. But safe is not where life comes alive. And when compared with the risk of dying within our own skin from living within our comfort zones, I'll take these risks any day.

We don't see things as they are, but as our eyes have been trained to see them (VIII). The lenses through which we view life determine how we experience it. And because these lenses are largely negative, we see and experience life negatively. Gratitude is the direct opposite of this and is the third way we can create happiness for ourselves. It not only helps us to appreciate that which we do have, but it becomes a lens that primes our eyes to see more of the positives in our lives. The more we notice the positives, the more we have to be grateful for. And the more we are grateful for, the more this lens becomes entrenched further increasing our ability to see the positives. Through doing so not only do we become more grateful for what we do have in our lives, we become grateful for the gift that life is.