Dr. Mercola January 19 2008 161,433 views
By Darshan Goswami, M.S., PE
Being happy is really a choice we make. The secret of Happiness is simple, very simple - what is it? You decide if you want to be happy!
We all strive for happiness in life. Like many, you probably think achievements such as education, marriage, family and social/financial status make you happy.
However, studies of happiness in several countries have found that these achievements have little to do with your happiness. For millions of people, happiness has remained a rather elusive goal. They‘ve tried to buy happiness.
They‘ve sought it through materialistic and pleasurable activities such as buying a new SUV or going on vacation. But nothing has seemed to work. For most people these changes, new possessions or temporary pleasures, might work for a while but will eventually become part of your status quo, and their power to deliver happiness will fade.
Researchers now strongly believe that your brains is hard-wired in ways that, at least to some degree, determine just how happy you‘re going to be. Some psychologists believe happiness is genetic. Other scientists say they may have located an important area of the brain where happiness is generated. As powerful as these genetic predispositions may be, happiness is still partly within your control, says David Myers, PhD, the John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich. "It‘s rather like our cholesterol level -- genetically influenced, yet also influenced by our habits and attitudes."
While these ideas are debated, you don’t have to wait to begin discovering happiness within yourself. You see happiness comes from your social relationships, enjoyable work, fulfillment, high self-esteem, a sense that your life has meaning, and joining civic and other groups.
Your life is sprinkled with ample opportunities for discovering happiness. Search for the small things that give you a little laugh or a smile. Take time to be with your family and friends. In the long run, these are the treasures that will enhance your happiness, not some grand achievements that only give you a lift for a short while.
One way to steer your life toward happiness is simply to count your blessings. Happy people know that they don‘t get to be happy all the time. They can appreciate brief moments, little victories, small miracles, and the personal interactions that bring real happiness.
Research has proven that happy people live longer, are healthier, are more successful, enjoy more fulfilling relationships, earn more money, and are liked and respected more.
What is Happiness and How Do You Achieve It?
Happiness seems to be a selfish goal. Happiness doesn‘t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future depends very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think positive thoughts of hope, confidence, love and success. You can be happy if you are a productive and useful member of society, share with others and help unselfishly.
Most experts agree that there are no shortcuts to happiness. Even the happy people do not experience joy twenty-four hours a day. A happy person can have a bad day but still experience pleasure in the small things in life. If you‘re not feeling happy today, fake it. In experiments, people who were manipulated to smile actually felt happier.
Don’t postpone happiness until you reach a certain goal, like getting a promotion or pay raise to go on vacation. Studies show that these effects are short-lived. Don’t focus on negative thoughts; balance that by consciously spending a few minutes every day thinking about the good things in your life. Like eating a balanced meal or getting enough rest, practice this everyday and, each day, try to extend the time you spend on positive thoughts.
Everybody has their own characteristics that lead them in different directions towards happiness. Perhaps, at best, these discussions are useful to provoke thoughts and reactions, which might help you to focus on what can be done to make your own life consistently happy.
Again, there is no rule or special formula that can make a person constantly happy. Instead, happiness comes from developing positive social relationships, enjoyable work, fulfillment, a sense that life has meaning, and joining civic and other social groups.
Take time to meditate, or say a prayer, thanking almighty God for all you have. A spiritual dimension is an essential component of happiness.
Can Money Buy You Happiness?
A lot of people share a fairly common misconception. They believe that having lots of money can make you happy. Some even say that the more money you have, the happier you can be. Others believe that having money is not spiritually or socially acceptable, and that money is the root cause of all evil.
Are any of these beliefs really true? To answer this question, begin by asking yourself what money means to you, and how do you treat it when you have it?
Depending on how it is used, money can create powerful, positive changes in the world. Having money allows us to function more easily in the world, it buys food, clothes, provides comfort in our lives and in the lives of others. However, because attachment to money is based on fear, it always creates insecurity.
The desire to have more money, and thereby feel more secure, never ends. Security can never come from money alone. Some of the people who have the most money are also the most insecure. Does this mean you must give up the desire to attain wealth?
Not necessarily.
In and of itself money is neither good nor bad. It is what we choose to do with money that determines if it will have a positive effect on others, society, the world, and ourselves.
So, it cannot be said that money is essential for happiness. But, most people recognize that money is important in the 21st Century because it can give people comfort and freedoms. But, does raising a nation‘s income, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), raise the population‘s overall level of happiness?
Intuitively, you‘d think the answer is a definite yes.
However, a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal found otherwise. Other studies also show that, in many countries, "although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust."
For example, since World War II, GDP per capita in the U.S. has tripled, but life satisfaction (measured by surveys that ask something like, "overall, how satisfied are you with your life?") has barely changed.
Also Japan and Western Europe had a tremendous rise in GDP per capita since 1958, yet measures of national happiness have been flat. One reason may be that a rising economy produces rising aspirations. There are many villages in the world where people do not own shoes but the people are extremely happy and friendly.
How to Bring Happiness in Your Life
“Don‘t worry, be happy.” This sounds like such a simplistic phrase, but there is great power and wisdom in it. This tells us to focus on what we want rather than what we don’t want. When we focus on what we want, our actions take us nearer to our goals in life.
One way to guide your life toward happiness is simply to count your blessings. Dr. Myers points to research showing that people who pause each day to reflect on the positive aspects of their lives (for example, their health, friends, family, education, freedom) are more likely to experience positive feelings and happiness.
These are the principles I use to be happy. They work for me, and I hope they work for you:
1) Improve your relationships with friends and family – Happiness starts at home. Start by improving your relationship with your parents, brothers, sisters, and children. Smile when you greet them, do things for them, don‘t allow them to get angry with you. Maintaining healthy loving relationships and friendships can promote happiness. Remember that love makes you beautiful. 2) Be an optimist - Optimism generates good feelings. 3) Develop a genuine smile and laugh a lot - Act happy - It works. Smile into the mirror for a half hour without stopping. Smiling makes you happy and the more you smile the more happy you become. We all like people who smile. It also makes us more attractive. 4) Pray - Become religious or spiritual - This only works if you believe in God. If you want to be happy then ask God to make you happy. Prayer helps you accomplish things. 5) Be generous and share with others - Give more than you receive because being generous will make you happy. 6) Treat time as a friend - Don‘t watch the clock. 7) Exercise your mind - Keep yourself busy with some new project or ideas. 8) Work your body - Exercise regularly. Studies show that aerobic exercise is an antidote for mild depression and anxiety. "Happy minds reside in sound bodies," says Dr. Myers. 9) Have fun in life - Keep cool under pressure. 10) Pursue achievable goals. 11) Have high confidence in yourself. 12) Respect the disadvantaged. 13) Age gracefully. 14) Give compliments - Take every opportunity to be complimentary. Want to make someone like you? Every time you meet a person smile and give them a compliment. 15) Be honest - With honesty comes openness. People respect honest and open minded people. 16) Keep an open mind - Most people seem to think that they know everything that they need to know. There‘s plenty of wisdom to go around. 17) Treat difficulties as challenges –Life‘s an adventure and every obstacle in life is one of its challenges. Treat life as a game. What fun would a game be if you could never lose?
1) Improve your relationships with friends and family – Happiness starts at home. Start by improving your relationship with your parents, brothers, sisters, and children. Smile when you greet them, do things for them, don‘t allow them to get angry with you. Maintaining healthy loving relationships and friendships can promote happiness. Remember that love makes you beautiful.
2) Be an optimist - Optimism generates good feelings.
3) Develop a genuine smile and laugh a lot - Act happy - It works. Smile into the mirror for a half hour without stopping. Smiling makes you happy and the more you smile the more happy you become. We all like people who smile. It also makes us more attractive.
4) Pray - Become religious or spiritual - This only works if you believe in God. If you want to be happy then ask God to make you happy. Prayer helps you accomplish things.
5) Be generous and share with others - Give more than you receive because being generous will make you happy.
6) Treat time as a friend - Don‘t watch the clock.
7) Exercise your mind - Keep yourself busy with some new project or ideas.
8) Work your body - Exercise regularly. Studies show that aerobic exercise is an antidote for mild depression and anxiety. "Happy minds reside in sound bodies," says Dr. Myers.
9) Have fun in life - Keep cool under pressure.
10) Pursue achievable goals.
11) Have high confidence in yourself.
12) Respect the disadvantaged.
13) Age gracefully.
14) Give compliments - Take every opportunity to be complimentary. Want to make someone like you? Every time you meet a person smile and give them a compliment.
15) Be honest - With honesty comes openness. People respect honest and open minded people.
16) Keep an open mind - Most people seem to think that they know everything that they need to know. There‘s plenty of wisdom to go around.
17) Treat difficulties as challenges –Life‘s an adventure and every obstacle in life is one of its challenges. Treat life as a game. What fun would a game be if you could never lose?
Conclusion
Being happy is really a choice we make. The secret of Happiness is simple, very simple - what is it? You decide if you want to be happy! Happiness is free. You can feel happiness, this very minute, if you so choose.
If you continue to focus all your energy and attention on what you want, you’ll soon find yourself happy. Realize now that true happiness results from sharing generously of yourself, your mind, emotion and spirit, with all those who come in contact with you.
Be an optimist.
Do kind deeds for others unselfishly. Explore the deeper resources within you by praying to God from your heart. Through sincere prayer and mindful meditation you will attain the highest achievement in life - the discovery of your eternal happiness with God.
We need to set our goals wisely and to develop happy-thought strategies and to surround ourselves with encouraging and positive people.
Pursuing truth, wisdom and a virtuous life - or just getting on with the duties and chores of daily life at work and home, often brings happiness as a by-product. My ultimate goal is to bring happiness to all my friends, family and all souls that come in contact with me. How can I possibly accomplish this?
Simple…I sincerely hope that after reading this message you will SMILE for me.
That will make both you and me happy!
Considering the fact that one of the more potent ways to optimize your health -- creating more happiness in your life -- beats disease naturally, why wouldn’t you want to do whatever you can to manifest positive emotions?
Lately I’ve been writing quite a bit about the impact your emotions have on your state of physical health. And the good news is that you can learn to deal with, and process emotional trauma and setbacks naturally, spiritually, and without drugs, by making some changes to your attitude and your daily routine.
Happiness will not only protect your body from stressors that can lead to coronary heart disease down the road, but it can even boost your immune system"s ability to fight off the common cold.
How Do You Measure Happiness?
Happiness is actually a fairly popular topic of scientific evaluation. There are quite a few experts with views on what happiness is, and how you create, or sabotage your own happiness.
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert is one such expert, whose research has found that you can ‘synthesize’ happiness. That you have a subconscious ‘psychological immune system’ that helps you change your views about your world, which leads to being more satisfied with what you have. And being “satisfied,” feeling that you have “enough,” will remove many of your negative energy drains.
Are you satisfied with “enough”? Then you’re probably already happier than most.
Another take is that by British psychologist, Adrian White with the University of Leicester, who published the first “world map of happiness” in 2007.
Based on a compilation of data from more than 100 studies in the field of happiness research, Denmark comes out at the top as the happiest nation out of 178 countries, followed by Switzerland and Austria, with the United States ranking in 23rd place.
White, A. (2007). A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge To Positive Psychology? Psychtalk 56, 17-20.
This map rates happiness based on a subjective “state of well-being” (SWB), conceptualized as a sense of satisfaction with your life, both in general and in specific areas such as relationships, health and work.
It is immediately evident that there is an effect of poverty on levels of SWB. However, White’s research found that SWB correlated most strongly with health, closely followed by wealth and access to basic education.
The fact that the U.S. ranked lower than countries like Iceland and Bhutan can perhaps be explained by our tragically flawed healthcare system with its excessive over-medicating, which has led to an epidemic of poor health, effectively reducing your state of well-being and overall happiness.
Tying Happiness to Your Personal Mission
For most people, it is very difficult to define what truly makes you happy. So I want to reiterate a definition that you can grasp and apply to your life with greater ease.
Happiness can be identified as “whatever gets you excited.” Happiness is that which makes you jump out of bed in the morning with eager anticipation to start your day. Once you identify that activity, whatever it is, you can start focusing your mind around that so you can structure you life to do more of it.
Personally, my happiness is tied to my mission to catalyze the change of the entire fatally flawed health paradigm. This is what makes me greatly anticipate every morning, and it is the driving force that allows me to truly enjoy the extensive hours of my “work” weeks.
Health + Happiness = Your Best Life
Health and happiness are indeed intertwined, and if good health promotes happiness, and vice versa, then you can optimize both by limiting your options to the basics -- that which is natural -- and realizing there’s no “magic pill” for either.
In reality, you only need to focus on a few very basic things to optimize your health, which will spill over into increased feelings of happiness and well being:
Begin to see your life as one whole, where you indeed have the power to affect change in each and every area, and remember that positive changes in one field of activity affects all the others, and you’ll be well on your way to creating the life you deserve; one of health, physical and emotional well being, and personal purpose.
This discussion about happiness is based on a false idea. Happiness is not a something to be pursued or hunted down or bought at great expense. Happiness is not like that. Happiness is intrinsic to our being human.
Observe any baby & it will demonstrate a state of happiness just by interacting with others around it. The baby will also demonstrate unhappiness if for instance it is hungry. To revert back to state of happiness we feed the baby. That is to say we remove the cause of unhappiness.
Happiness is a state we can all enjoy as long as we don't cover it with blankets of unhappiness. This is well understood by those who persuade us that having more of something will enable us to achieve happiness. By inducing a state of unhappiness we are persuaded to buy more & to consume more. The epidemic of obesity is an epidemic caused by the mass manufacture of unhappiness.
This is done by confusing happiness with pleasure. You will be happy if you consume more fizzy drinks say the advertisements. What they are really selling are temporary pleasures which have the appearance of happiness. People then become addicted to the pleasures so they have to consume more.
We should focus on reducing unhappiness. Unhappiness is not the opposite of happiness it is an oppressor of happiness.To let our underlying state of happiness shine through we need to remove those blankets of oppression.
So rather than 'pursuing' happiness think about how to reduce unhappiness. This is not a simple thing of course. We all feel unhappy when we grieve for example but if we know that this unhappiness is a blanket over our happiness we can cope much better. We know that this blanket can be removed.
We as humans are naturally happy. We just need to let it shine through & be aware of how we impose unhappiness on ourselves & how we impose it on other people & what we can do to reduce it.
Several points were made in the conclusion. I'm interested in knowing which one made you unhappy, and why.
Here is my observation. Right after I read the above article, I felt happier and more hopeful. The VERY FIRST comment posted was one of negativity and criticism, and I immediately felt my spirit deflate a bit. There is something to be said for choosing your attitude toward any given cicumstance and the effect our own negativity can have on others. Eating well is important to our mental health, but so is caring about others, exercising, and worship.
Kudos, Bridestein! Foods are a type of drugs, if you get my drift. I was terribly depressed many years ago, so added 2 fish oil gels and one 5-HTP (a day)...and that same DAY I was noticably happier, and the depression was gone! I was SHOCKED! So cheap, easy, fast...and you couldn‘t wipe the smile off my face! That was about 7-8 YEARS ago, and I wouldn‘t be without those magic suppliments--ever! I hope some of you try that if you are even a little depressed...works like a charm!
~Stevon
Just to relate, I myself have suffered tremendously (in my opinion) from ailments such as chronic (incessant) pain, debilitating chronic fatigue, and severe chronic depression, etc., for the past three to four years. Anyways, I postulate that unhappiness can be viewed like any health problem or what have you and needs to be percieved holistically. There could be one factor (in your case it happened to be poor conventional nutrition) causing or pertaining to your unhappiness, conversely there may be ample factors(i.e. health (emotional/mental/physical) problems, social issues, attitude, substance abuse, addiction(s), spiritual problems, financial troubles, etc.). I undoubtedly think that in order to abolish or alleviate your unhappiness, the factors relevant to your individual situation need to be attended to, however, some factors supercede others.
I agree with rover and I have a definition of happiness that serves me well: HAPPINESS is the feeling information we get when we have truly resolved a conflict, made it go away. It is short lived but those who get good at conflict resolution experience it a lot more than those who provoke and keep conflicts alive or even escalated. Happiness is different from other positive feelings such as pleasure or joy and it isn't a good thing to see any one feeling as "the desirable state in life". A life without joy (experiencing our souls desire-- doing what we truly want) can still feel bleak even when we get good at keeping out of conflicts ...
What a wonderful and welcome reply Sheila C. The joy of the Lord is my strength! Holding unforegiveness, malice and anger is known to leach Ca out of the blood stream, hence a significant contributing factor in bone loss. Interestingly, the scriptures tell us, that unforgiveness malice and strife causes dry bones. That's where science and scriptures once again mesh.
Blessings
Dr. Trudy