The touch road to happiness

The tough road to happiness
Yesterday, I stood in line at a gas station and when the gentleman in front of me was ready to pay, the attendant said to him “you are not very happy today”. The guy responded by saying that he was in a hurry, and that there was not much to be happy about.
When my turn to pay came, and I said “good afternoon”, the lady says to me, “I can tell you are happy” to which I responded, “of course I am happy, just waking up in the morning is cause for celebration, do you know how many people never wake up because they die in their sleep”?
She laughed and we continued our conversation for a while and said that she could feel the negative energy or the positive energy of people that go there to pump gas or shop.
Aristotle said “fulfillment and contentment are pathways to happiness” and he was right for the most part, although human beings face obstacles and situations that life throws in front of us but that luckily we can certainly handle or learn how to handle.
The great question, nurture or nature, still around since the beginning of mankind is now clearer than ever before. It is about a 50/50 split which means that 50 percent of your happiness quotient can be worked at, cultivated and developed by you and the other 50% is already set in your brain or hard drive as some like to call it.
I myself feel lucky because I have the happiness DNA, from my mother’s side of the family which makes it much easier to be happy because I already have 50% of the battle won.
So we can conclude that some people have a higher or lower happiness threshold than others but everyone can learn to increase the happiness factor by behaviors that can be implemented and practiced.
I must warn that it is not easy to change the way you think, especially since you have been thinking in a certain way your whole life. Remember, you are retraining thought processes that have been cemented in your brain and now you want to change.
You are not definitely going to change from a card carrying pessimist to an optimist in the next couple of hours, but you can definitely start, in a split second, to change one thought, one idea and that thought or idea can make you happier.
For example, if right now, even though you might consider yourself a pessimist or you are feeling unhappy, you can close your eyes, take a deep breath and think about a very happy moment in your life, no matter if it was many years ago, just think about that moment for a few seconds, at this particular moment that you are thinking about that, it is impossible to be unhappy. Even if you are chemically depressed, you can certainly feel less depressed.
One interesting technique to work your way to happiness is to understand what is standing in your way and then learn how to go around those obstacles.
Some people simply expect the worst all the time. They even defend that position by saying “if I expect the worst, then I won’t be disappointed”. The problem with this is that always imagining a bad outcome brings out negative emotions such as worry and fear, which in turn ignite the stress response that fills our bodies with cortisone and adrenaline. When this stress response is constantly turned on, it not only wears down your body’s immune system, but it also drains your chance of experiencing a positive feeling, like happiness. It would be rather difficult, maybe impossible to have a negative emotion and a positive emotion at the same time; I just can’t see how it can happen.
All you are accomplishing by worrying or forecasting something that in reality isn’t even happening and may actually never happen, is keeping the stress response mechanism turned on, thus not allowing you to enjoy whatever positive is happening at that very minute. In fact, we could say that you are cheating yourself out of happiness or at least the “happy” feeling you could be enjoying at the moment.
If you feel that you deserve to be happy and your lousy job, your horrible boss, your rebel kid or annoying wife (I have experienced this) is supposed to make you happy, I have got news for you. It won’t happen. Happiness is an internal thing, not an external one. There might be times when an outside event can make us feel better, but it is just a matter of time before we fall into unhappiness again, waiting for another external event to take us out of the unhappiness. You go out and buy a BMW, go shopping, or buy expensive clothes to make you feel better and for a while it works, but then, you go back down and of course, you are out of the money and maybe even in debt.
You can fall into an insatiable cycle that won’t ever result in long term happiness.
Think about it. People have the mistaken opinion that if terrible things happen to someone, that person would be miserable forever. It is a fact that people that who have had terrible things happen, do become rather unhappy momentarily, but eventually, they return to the level of happiness they had before or at least close to it.
In fact, happiness isn’t about our circumstances as much as we have been led to believe or have learned in the past.
The moment of truth is when you understand and internalize that happiness is your own responsibility. You must turn your focus within. Answer questions such as what are my strengths, who am I, what unique gifts I have, how am I contributing to society, how am I making my family happy, how can I become a better person?
When I am helping others, contributing to society or giving I feel better and happier.
This is probably, although I am not one hundred percent sure because the guy is dead, what Aristotle meant by the word fulfillment. It actually has nothing to do with another human being or as a matter of fact, anything else.
Your life, my life, anyone’s life will never be perfect. We must accept it as fact. Hey, the world is not perfect period, and if you insist in thinking that it can be perfect or that your life can be perfect, you are waging a losing battle.
If you are always in a state of displeasure, rejoicing in what is wrong with or missing from or negative about your life, you can’t be thinking about all the good things going on in your life.
So, a good technique is for you, to on a daily basis ask yourself three simple questions:
What am I grateful for today?
What good things happened to me today?
What am I satisfied about today or put differently, what positive feelings do I have for all the good that happened to me today?
If you say “nothing”, you may need professional help because there is always something good about your day. In fact, just making it home in one piece is already a positive thing.
Another effective technique is to fake enthusiasm. Yes, even if you are not feeling enthusiastic, fake it and soon you will believe it and you will become enthusiastic.
There is quite a bit of evidence that shows that regularly practicing happiness, simply asking yourself questions like those I discussed in this article, has been found to decrease feelings of depression, even in severely depressed people and to enhance the happiness factor in everyone else.