I Want To Be Unhappy!!!!
Is there any way we can be happy without effort. One day wake up and it is a feeling that we cannot run away from? Is there anyway where our learned trait and habits are that of a positive nature? Could we have success in transforming our mindset to that of loving all the time and not having a reason for it, with no effort and just because? What I know now in my present perceived reality is that there is little effort spent in being miserable. It is much easier to blame everyone else and including work, government, school, the milkman, the in-laws, and the person that cut you off this morning….. It is so easy and comforting to know we do not have to take accountability for our unhappiness. In the first place most of the time we have created our own damage to our psyche. We have conditioned ourselves to believe the perceptions we have allowed ourselves to listen to. There is a group of people that have visited Los Angeles this month from the Special Olympics. They did not choose their current state of being. Their being is perceived by the rest of the world as challenging and out of the normal in society, yet they are an amazing group of people performing amazing feats that a “normal” person cannot even begin to accomplish. They are truly special. They have attacked that exterior perception of themselves and internalized their view of themselves as amazing and powerful! If you watch any news reports about their games and see their faces, they are always happy. Are they challenged? Yes of course they are, but not in the way you think. They are challenged because of the general view of their state of being. They do know the difference between unhappiness and happiness. They do have a choice and know that either is available.
Effortless happiness is only achieved through quiet time or what is called meditation, or at least some inter thinking of ones being. Getting in touch with your essence so important if you are to find that internal happiness that is called love. We all have it inside us. It is our soul, essence, being, spirit, Conscious…..Yes conscious….. If we start to understand what we are about and how we are made we can stop suffering. WE will always experience. The perceptions of the experience will change. We can sort out the emotions and feelings and categorize them accordingly. We can wash our different negative states of mind with love and transform them into amazing experiences that strengthen us and shape who we can potentially be. It is hard work but worth the effort. It is harder to work towards that connection to our essence than to accept the vulgarity of pain and discomfort as “normal”.
I always tell people that they have a choice. To be happy or not. I always get the reply that I make it sound so easy. Where in that statement did I say it was easy? I said one or the other is our choice. The easy choice and most comfortable is unhappiness. There is no effort involved. No work. Just sit back accept and feel what the majority of the world is believing. Hard work is being uncomfortable, feeling the pain, conditioning you to something that is not”normal”. Inside us we have the drive that is our love for ourselves; a sense of the effort is good and just. We have a fire inside us that connects to the feeling of happiness and joy, when we experience it we do not feel our physical pains, we heal quicker, think logically, love everyone and it is reciprocated. We share our true inner selves with the world around us and it feels awesome!
Happy or Unhappy? Give it a try. I bet I am right. If I am not then don’t read this blog. I will still love you anyway.
Mindset
We go through life reacting to situations around us. Our fast paced world dictates that. WE have so many distractions to not allow us to focus on the “ME” in our lives. WE always focus on everything else around us. Our external world is very overwhelming. How do we focus on ourselves without feeling selfish or guilty? We have to change our mindset. We have to focus on our strengths and eliminate weaknesses; sort out what is causing us a rift between our happiness. All of this is an opinion of mine based on my experience and what I study and observe. You can process my information anyway that makes you comfortable. You can twist it for something that it is not. I have no gain by convincing you to believe either way from left to right. I have only a mission in life is to help you change your perceptions of Happiness.
The mindset I am talking about is a very simple process that takes a lot of hard work. First step is to accept the things you cannot change. How is that done? Well….. If you have no control over the situation or problem then you have no reason to worry about it. All you can do is change your perception towards how you are going to feel about it. Once you decide to accept what cannot be changed in your life, you will need to find out how to quiet your mind. These two steps can be done together.
Sit in a room with no distractions whatsoever and observe what comes to your thoughts. Sort out the thoughts that you cannot change or control at that present moment. Review your thoughts one by one. Eliminate one by one by what you cannot control. If there is a situation that is serious but you cannot handle at the moment your sitting there… don’t think of it. Move on to the next thought or emotion. What you will find out is that everything in life has a priority list. Some situations can be resolved with some work, with the assistance of someone else; some things will be resolved over a long and short period of time.
For the sake of the exercise you are focusing on that specific moment alone in your space, all you can control at the moment in time is quieting your mind. You are there alone in your thoughts and worrying about this or that is not important at the present moment. You will find that sitting and eliminating the thought, for a temporary moment is affordable and possible. The problem will still exist after you are done focusing. All you are doing is removing it from your thought process temporarily. (eventually permanently)
After you have removed 99.9% of what you think is important for your thought processes, you are left with an empty mindset. Fill it up with one thought or memory in your life that made you feel good. In fact think of a moment that made you feel overwhelmingly excited. So excited that you could scream and yell just remembering it. Hold on to that emotion or feeling from that moment and continue to hold it for a couple of minutes. Let it go after a five minutes. Now think of a horrible time or memory, experience in your life where it was so tragic or heartbreaking that thinking about it makes you cry. Hold on to that for five minutes and then let it go.
Now reflect on the two emotions and compare. Which one was easiest to remember? Which one was easier to re-create the emotion or feeling? Most people can remember the negative. For most it takes less time to remember the bad than the good. It takes work to remember a great moment than a negative experience. Once you remember the good moment it is easy to enjoy it. When you capture the negative moment it is hard to maintain the painful emotions you easily remembered.
At the beginning of this post I stated, “The mindset I am talking about is a very simple process that takes a lot of hard work.” This mindset is happiness. It takes work to achieve happiness but once you are there it is effortless. The hard work isn’t at maintaining happiness; the hard work is applied towards how to eliminate the distractions that block our happiness.
I hope my thoughts that I have shared will give you a little help if you are struggling with something. I love all of you and hope you will continue reading. It is all about our mindset.
God Bless.
The Surprising Science of Happiness by Dan Gilbert
[kad_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU&feature=player_embedded” width=425 height=349 ]
Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness. ~ William E. Gladstone, British Prime Minister, 1892 – 1894
What is real happiness? Is happiness that we make up true happiness?
According to social psychologist, Dan Gilbert, there are 2 kinds of happiness. One is natural happiness which we experience when we get what we want and the other is synthetic happiness which we manufacture when we don’t get what we want.
Here’s a question for you: Is one better than the other?
Let’s find out.
In denial or truly happy?
I am sure you have heard about people who after experiencing a bad event or a disappointing setback tells others and themselves that they are better off despite not getting what they want and that they wouldn’t change that for anything in the world.
Well, it turns out that these people aren’t overt-optimists who are in denial about their misfortune. It turns out that their “synthetic” happiness did make them happy. For real.
In his Ted Talk, social psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about people fabricating happiness after not getting what they want or experiencing a real nasty experience such as being wrongly convicted and served decades worth of a jail sentence for something he has not done.
The sentiment expressed by the man who was wrongly convicted was that it was a “glorious experience”. Really? Surely that is not the right feelings to have after serving time for so long for something you did not do?
Naturally, we think that these people must be lying to themselves, they can’t be truly happy with their experience but we could be wrong….
Using unconscious memory to test happiness
Well, in an experiment Gilbert conducted on patients with anterograde amnesia who cannot form new memories he first asked the patients to rate a lineup of 6 Monet prints from 1 being the least-liked to 6 being the most-liked. Then, he told them that as a gift they would be given either print number 3 or 4 as a gift and most of them picked number 3 over 4 just because of preference. The researchers then left the room and returned (bear in mind that the patients do not remember the research team nor what transpired before) and the patients was asked again to rank the 6 paintings from least-liked to most-liked.
Here’s the interesting bit:
The individuals now rank the number 3 painting at number 2, higher than before and the number 4 painting which was rejected was now ranked even lower than before at number 5. The results indicated that they are happier with the painting they had owned more than before and they liked the rejected painting even less even though they do not have any conscious memory of the paintings.
With this experiment, Gilbert found that individuals make their own synthetic happiness unconsciously. Gilbert also found that this unconscious ability to synthesize happiness happens more often in situations where we do not have control over the situation.
In essence, we are really good at making ourselves feel better about an outcome that occurs from a situation that is out of our hands.
Now, what does this mean for you and why should you pay any attention?
Here are 3 reasons why you should pay attention:
1. Synthetic happiness is not fake. It is not something you make up when you are pissed off about not getting what you want. Synthetic happiness is a natural mechanism we all have in our brains that lets us see a not-so-ideal situation in a different light and learn to like our situation which in turns does let us become happier in time to come.
2. The ability to synthesize happiness is a vital skill to have because we cannot have everything we want all of the time. The truth is we will all face disappointment at some points in our life and we need to be able to manufacture happiness and become adept at seeing the better side of life.
Here’s a point to ponder: clinically-depressed individuals do not have the ability to synthesize happiness in most situations of their lives and that is why they find it harder to see the greener side of life.
3. We often grossly overestimate or underestimate how naturally happy we will feel in any situation. Truth is we will only truly know how happy we will feel and continue to feel when we are actually experiencing thus being able to synthesize happiness helps us cope with the uncertainty of our future outcome.
In Conclusion:
The joyful state that we feel is made up of both synthetic and natural happiness. Neither is better than the other because to lead a balanced life we need both: Natural happiness lets us experience the good stuff and synthetic happiness lets us adapt and appreciate what we do have when the outcome is less than ideal. When you start exercising the ability to synthesize happiness, you may find that some situations are not as terrible as they appear at first.
Can you think of a time when you synthesized happiness? What event caused you to synthesize happiness at the time and did the feeling of happiness continued?
Share your comments below.