Thoughts on happiness

[WhiteLove]

Lately I have done some research into what experts are saying these days about happiness.

The overall message is somewhat confusing or at least mixed, but most seem to agree that the happiness zone is the union of meaning and pleasure, preferrably in the same activity. So you want to fill your life with activities where each has BOTH meaning and pleasure. Paying bills has meaning, but not so much pleasure. If your life just contains these types of activities, you are in the habit of eating the healthy but not so tasty hamburger as a way of living, which gives you a less happy life. The hamburger model for happiness was developed by Harvard professor Tal Ben Shahar.

Tal puts it nicely when he connects happiness to a "whole" well being, that you become happier when you become more whole in well being, in other words that happiness is a product of well being that spans a set of well being dimensions and it is when you increase your well being in all of these that you also turn happier.

Tal defines these well being dimensions as spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional. So as a positive psychology expert you would typically map out the activities of your clients with a matrix of these well being dimensions and figure out how to impact your life of activities in such a way that you get "well-being increases" in all of these well being dimensions while also ensuring the activities are both meaningful and give you pleasure.

Technically there are several things you can do to further boost this. First of all, you can scale both meaning and pleasure by giving them a score, in this way you get a better insight into exactly how much happiness each activity contributes with. I think a 1-3 score model is optimal in the beginning, then once you master that on the technical level, you can scale out further to a 1-5 score model. Once you master these you can go more advanced and start to replace even those activities that are in the happiness sweet spot, with the goal to get a better overall score as well as a better balance across the well being dimensions.

You can do lots of more creative stuff with this, I am just trying to inspire you to play with this in order to create a happier life. Just to give you an example, you can for instance change the way you do things, in order to bring more meaning and pleasure to them. So for instance if you exercise, but hate it, you can consider doing something else that gives you exercise but also pleasure. It could be for instance riding a motorcycle instead of biking, or something similar where you definitely add some amount of additional pleasure to it. Another similar technique would be to minimize the amount of time you spend doing things that give you little meaning and pleasure, simply do those tasks much faster...

The happiness researchers are also concluding that happiness is also rooted in maximizing emotional turnover, meaning that you should unconditionally accept whatever emotions you have rather than fighting them. It is good for the health to ride the peaks and valleys and allow yourself to be human through unconditional acceptance of it.

Now, what is in my opinion most important of all of this, is that none of this works unless you are true to yourself. Do not score 3 in pleasure on an activity that is actually truly a 1. Another thing is that for this to work you need to implement it while also ensuring you stay aligned to a simplify approach, because the art of happiness has also been found to be rooted in the ability to simplify things. So you might want to find ways of doing less and that which you do is more meaningful and gives you more pleasure also... So it has to be pretty lightweight so that there is room for reflection/mindfulness and gratitude. Your goal is to walk away from the stressful rat race and engage in things that enable you freedom to be your authentic true self.

In terms of success, what they have discovered also is that it gives you only short term pleasure, you quickly return to whatever happiness level you had before your success. If you struggled before your breakthrough, then after some time you will be back in that state. So it is not about money, success or achievements, it is more about the journey itself when it also has meaning and pleasure.

You do not change your happiness level over night, therefore I do think that the strategy that pays off is when you care enough and make it serious enough to map out and follow up your happiness progress with great engagement and care. Simply put, you will have to be strict enough and be able to see you are making the changes necessary, if you are sloppy you will be at risk of eating the hamburger you do not want, so discipline will pay off... But it won't work unless you make that process fun too and it has to be "want to" rather than "need to", that is another thing they have discovered... So it is a bit of an art... Do not forget or underestimats the pleasure of great happiness though, what I am saying is that making a few technical mistakes along the way might at the end be well worth it.

I hope I got the ingredients included, this is what the experts are saying so there must be something to it. Overall I think the concepts are still a bit cloudy, but I do see the logical reasoning behind all of these ideas and I do think many eat the burgers that are both unhealthy and non-tasty. So overall following some recipe at least as a kind of happiness insurance, appears smarter than not doing so.

One more thing, when you score the pleasure, maybe it is best to start with -3 to 3, because some activities give you the opposite to pleasure, so those are important to spot early like what they truly are. You might in deed be suffering with a number of activities you perform on a daily basis, those are not making you happier.

For any of this to make any sense you will have to force the overall score ribbon higher through your updated set of activities, but that I think can quickly become a lot of fun when you become good at this technically. I think all of this is about doing it technically right so that it becomes something interesting and fun that makes sense and creates positive results.

The "spire" model is interesting, I am also open to the idea that there might be even more optimal well being dimensions one can identify.

Just a final warning, this might actually change your life.

Connecting = meaning & pleasure

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iHLmP1lvu88

[Conde]

https://gomovies.is/film/the-happy-film-21173/

This documentary follows Austrian designer Stefan Sagmeister as he tries to redesign his personality to become a happier and better person. His unique designs and painfully personal experiences mark a journey that travels closer to himself than ever intended.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cPMr5ihHDgg