How to be happy and live happily?
It seems that for many of us, being sad is more acceptable and understandable than being happy.
To such an extent that if we see someone in a taxi or bus who is standing quietly and sadly absorbed in himself, we understand him; But if a person constantly smiles or giggles and is happy, we think he is crazy.
Have you ever mistaken someone for crying out loud in an open environment as crazy?
These simple examples – which all of us have experienced more or less in our daily lives – show that, as many people believe, the path to a happy life is not as easy as it seems, and many of us have accepted that few people can live a completely happy life.
In addition to all these difficulties, even if we try and experience happiness, the society with the false belief that “after every laugh, there is a cry” takes away the license of deep happiness from us. and it injects us with an imaginary fear of an uncertain future.
A different experience of happy life
The issue of living a happy life faces other challenges and complications. Including that many of us from childhood to adulthood learn to use non-constructive methods to be happy and experience happiness:
Maybe you are one of those who, in your childhood, heard from your parents to endure hardships: “Be satisfied and happy that many people are living with much more hardships and difficulties than us.”
Even if you didn’t have such an experience as a child, Television must have made such an experience for you as an adult. A technique in such a way that “by seeing the problems of other countries, we feel happy about our own problem-free and fewer problems.”
As an example of this effective technique, we can point out that a well-known method to better tolerate the polluted air of your city is to see pictures of the polluted air of Beijing.
Using the tool of comparison with others as an engine to create happy life is just one of the tools that is promoted and encouraged in many cultures.
The importance of happiness Is it really important to live a happy life?
Do we really need to look for ways to achieve happiness? Is happiness and having a smile on your face so important that it is one of the key topics of personal development? Isn’t trying to live a happy life a selfish act?
Maybe these questions seem simple. But in cultures like ours, where happiness is less encouraged and happy people are described with adjectives like “carefree” and “happy” and “blessed”, the answers to these questions become important.
Being happy and living happily makes us:
• Increase our health (in its broadest sense).
• Strengthen our immune system.
• The probability of success in our joint life increases and the probability of divorce in our life decreases.
• Have more friends and receive more social support.
• Increase our productivity.
• Be more creative.
• The quality of work and as a result, our income will increase.
• Have more control over ourselves and increase our willpower and ability to manage emotions.
You can easily understand that these qualities are not just personal achievements and that the people around you also benefit from them. Therefore, you need to remind yourself that my happy life contributes to the happiness and satisfaction of those around me, and for this reason, I need to spend more time to “live happy”.
What is the purpose of a happy life?
For many years in the world, positive psychologists have focused on improving the quality of life of healthy people instead of trying to heal patients, and one of the most important components of a healthy life is happiness.
The reality is that most of us, rather than having an accurate understanding of happiness, can only tell what makes us happier or less happy.
For this reason, instead of explaining happiness, we immediately go to the concepts related to happiness, such as satisfaction.
There are not even few people who consider happiness and satisfaction to be synonymous and think that one of these two brings the other with it.
Happiness and satisfaction are two different concepts
We assume that “happiness” and “satisfaction” are so closely related that examples of violations of this assumption bother us.
When someone is satisfied with life, but not happy, we consider him a depressed patient (after all, why shouldn’t he be happy?).
Also, when someone is not satisfied with his life, but he is happy and smiling, we say that he is ” drunk” (why should he be happy in this situation?).
However, the:
Whenever we cannot understand why someone is happy or not, we call him happy or depressed.
Whereas what we mean is: according to the criteria I define, he should be happy now [or not happy]. Right now, by my standards, he’s mistakenly happy [or unreasonably unhappy.]
Relationship between happiness and goal setting: do you prefer silver medal or bronze?
Think very quickly and say that in a sports competition, do you think the silver medalist or the bronze medalist is happier?
At first glance, it seems that winning a silver medal should bring more happiness.
But a study conducted in the Olympics showed that the average happiness of those who won a bronze medal is higher.
One of the reasons is that the silver medalist thinks that he could have a gold medal now.
But the bronze medalist thinks she might not be on the podium at all.
In fact, it is our expectations and conceivable alternatives that determine how happy we are with any achievement and outcome.
This was just an example. An example to emphasize that happiness cannot be left only to system one and quick intuitive judgments.
It is not difficult to understand that “greater success does not necessarily bring more happiness”; But provided that the analytical system of our brain is fully active and performs these calculations.
Our analysis of the future is fault
We humans do not analyze the future correctly. For example, we think that a bigger house and a better car will bring a lot of happiness.
Because of this great happiness, we get caught up in overtime and debt, but in the end, the new car and house make us happy for a short time and then the habit comes to us.
Of course, this does not mean that we do not try to change and keep everything as it is. But the problem is that we do not properly understand that with suffering and effort today we suffer tomorrow will bring us so much happiness.
