Note: I have not been doing such a great job
of posting to my happiness blog over the past few months, and am going to try
to change that. Moving forward, I am going to work hard to add a new post each
week, focused on how to find and sustain happiness, based on my own experience
and thinking about the subject. Happiness can be hard to achieve sometimes, but
the more we look for happiness, the more we find it. The more effort we put
into being happy, the more we achieve it. Even more important than that, the
happier we are, the brighter our world will be, which helps everyone around us
(and, in turn, creates an environment that can help us be happier). In the end,
that is what we are talking about – building a better world for ourselves, and
for everyone who encounters us.
All of us get unhappy from time to time. What
I have found is that the key to happiness is to put in some effort. Then, what
is really cool is that the more effort you put in, eventually, the less you
need to put in. The mind is eminently trainable. We are who we are largely
because of how we grew up, and then because of the experiences that have shaped
us over the course of our lives. What that means, though, is that it is within
our power to shape the way our minds work, the way they respond to things, the
way our feelings work.
This shaping of the way we feel about things
can be short-term or long-term; and the more we shape our minds to be happy,
the more it will happen naturally.
Practically, what that means is that if we
can find ways to help get ourselves out of bad moods, the more our minds will
start to do that naturally. The longer we put in the work, the easier it will be
to get happy, and the more we will be happy as a natural state of mind.
Something I have written about a bit, and
will try to write about more and more, is the tactics I have found that help me
be a happier person. Yes, I have been blessed with a naturally happy
disposition, but I also work at it. I have worked at it for decades, and I see
pretty much every day that the work has made an incredible difference in my
happiness.
For many years, for example, I faced serious
bouts of melancholy (depression) that were at times so bad that I could not go
to work. Life decisions have been made based on these emotional states. Today,
though, I seldom even get in a bad mood; on the rare occasions when it is
really bad, bordering on depression, it never lasts more than a few hours or
overnight. Over the decades, my mind has become conditioned to be mostly happy,
and to deal with it quickly when I am not.
One of the best tactics I have found to deal
with occasional unhappiness is to sit in a quiet place and focus on making a
list of things that make me happy. It does not need to have any particular
order or really any other specific qualities – it is just a list of things that
make me happy.
Here is an example:
1. Seeing my wife when we first wake
up in the morning.
2. Playing with my dog.
3. Eating pie. Pretty much any kind
of pie.
4. Speaking to an old friend.
5. Volunteering my time to a worthy
cause.
6. Having sex.
7. Getting out in the fresh air for
a walk.
8. Playing with children.
9. Writing in my journal.
10. Making a to-do list and finishing
it.
11. Exercising.
That was a pretty short list, but even just
writing that amount made me feel a little better. My recommendation is to
number a page at least to 25, or maybe even 50 or 100, and force yourself to
fill in every line. This will make you really dig deep and think about obscure
things that make you happy. That deep thinking can really take you out of your
current head space and help you get to a happier place.
Of course, the other advantage to creating a
list like this is that now you have a list of things that can help make you
happy, and you can pick a few things and do them, if you still need a boost.
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