The large portion of your happiness that you control is determined by your habits, attitude, and outlook on life. Photo: File.
Decades of research have shown we are largely responsible for our own happiness – and who wants to be miserable by choice? Travis Bradberry says we can all be happier if we try hard enough.
Of course, we all want to be happy, but happiness can be fleeting. How can we find it and keep it alive?
Psychologists at the University of California have discovered some fascinating things about happiness.
Psychology Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky is known among her peers as ‘’the Queen of Happiness’’. She began studying happiness as a graduate student and has never stopped.
One of her main discoveries is that we all have a happiness ‘’set point’’.
When extremely positive or negative events happen – such as buying a house or losing a job – they temporarily increase or decrease our happiness, but we eventually drift back to our set point.
Dr Lyubomirsky has found our genetic set point is responsible for only about 50 per cent of our happiness; life circumstances affect about 10 per cent, while 40 per cent is completely up to us.
The large portion of your happiness that you control is determined by your habits, attitude, and outlook on life.
Permanently adopting new habits – especially those that involve intangibles, such as how you see the world – is hard, but breaking the habits that make you unhappy is much easier.
There are numerous bad habits that tend to make us unhappy. Eradicating these can move your happiness set point in short order.
Amazing things happen around you every day if you only know where to look because technology has exposed us to so much and made the world seem smaller.
Yet, there’s a downside that isn’t spoken of much: exposure raises the bar on what it takes to be awestruck.
That’s a shame, because few things are as uplifting as experiencing true awe. It reminds us that we’re not the centre of the universe.
It’s hard to be happy when you just shrug your shoulders every time you see something new.
Isolating yourself from social contact is a pretty common response to feeling unhappy, but there’s a body of research that says it’s the worst thing you can do.
Socialising, even when you don’t enjoy it much, is still good for you.
Recognise that when unhappiness is making you antisocial, you need to force yourself to get out and mingle.
We need to feel in control of our lives in order to be happy, which is why blaming is so incompatible with happiness.
When you blame other people or circumstances for the bad things that happen to you, you’ve decided you have no control over your life.
It’s hard to be happy without feeling in control, but you can take this too far in the other direction by making yourself unhappy through trying to control too much.
The only person you can control in your life is you. When you feel that nagging desire to dictate other people’s behaviour, this will inevitably blow up in your face and make you unhappy.
Happy people make their time count. Instead of complaining about how things could have been or should have been, they reflect on everything they have to be grateful for.
Then they find the best solution available to the problem, tackle it, and move on.
Nothing fuels unhappiness quite like pessimism. The problem with a pessimistic attitude is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect bad things, you’re more likely to get bad things.
Force yourself to look at the facts, and you’ll probably see that things are not nearly as bad as they seem.
Complainers and negative people are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions.
There’s a fine line between lending a sympathetic ear and getting sucked into their negative emotional spirals. You can avoid this by setting limits and distancing yourself when necessary.
Think of it this way: If a person were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke?
Anyone who makes you feel worthless, anxious, or uninspired is wasting your time and, quite possibly, making you more like them. Life is too short to associate with people like that. Cut them loose.
Fear is nothing more than a lingering emotion fuelled by your imagination.
It’s the uncomfortable rush of adrenaline you get when you almost step in front of a bus.
Fear is a choice. Happy people know this better than anyone, so they are addicted to the euphoric feeling they get from conquering their fears.
When all is said and done, you will lament the chances you didn’t take far more than you will your failures.
Like fear, the past and the future are products of your mind. No amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of anxiety can change the future.
Happy people know this, so they focus on living in the moment. This is how you do this.
Accept your past: If you don’t make peace with your past, it will never leave you and it will create your future.
Happy people know the only good reason to look at the past is to see how far they have come.
Accept the uncertainty of the future: Don’t place unnecessary expectations upon yourself. Worry has no place in the here and now. As Mark Twain once said: “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”
We can’t control our genes, and we can’t control all of our circumstances, but we can rid ourselves of habits that serve no purpose other than to make us miserable.
Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart. His books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. He can be contacted at TalentSmart.com. This article first appeared on the TalentSmart website.
